Users Guide

10
Connectors
A controller contains one or more connectors (channels or ports) to which you can attach disks. You can
externally access a connector by attaching an enclosure (for external disks) to the system or internally
access by attaching to the backplane (for internal disks) of a system. You can view the connectors on the
controller by expanding the controller object in the tree view.
NOTE: For PCIe SSD, connectors are referred as PCIe SSD extenders.
Channel Redundancy
You can create a virtual disk that uses physical disks that are attached to different controller channels.
The physical disks may reside in an external enclosure or the backplane (internal enclosure). If the virtual
disks maintain redundant data on different channels, then these virtual disks are channel redundant.
Channel redundancy is when one of the channels fail, the data is not lost as redundant data resides on
another channel.
Channel redundancy is implemented by selecting physical disks on different channels when using the
Create Virtual Disk Advanced Wizard.
NOTE: Channel redundancy only applies to controllers that have more than one channel and that
attach to an external disk enclosure.
Creating A Channel-Redundant Virtual Disk
NOTE: Channel redundancy only applies to controllers that have more than one channel and that
attach to an external disk enclosure.
The following instructions provide information on creating a virtual disk that uses channel redundancy.
1. Launch the Create Virtual Disk Advanced Wizard:
a. In the Server Administrator window, under the system tree, click Storage dashboard.
b. Locate the controller on which you are creating a channel-redundant virtual disk and expand the
controller object until the Virtual Disks object is displayed.
c. Select Virtual Disks and click Go To The Create Virtual Disk Wizard.
d. Click Virtual Disk Advanced Wizard.
2. Follow the steps in Create Virtual Disk Advanced Wizard.
3. Click Exit Wizard to cancel the virtual disk creation. In this step, you select the channels and the disks
to be used by the virtual disk. The selections you make determine whether the virtual disk is channel-
redundant.
There are specific RAID level and configuration requirements for implementing channel redundancy.
You must select the same number of physical disks on each channel that you use. For information on
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