Users Guide

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Enclosures And Backplanes
Physical disks can be contained in an enclosure or attached to the backplane of a system. An enclosure is
attached to the system externally while the backplane and its physical disks are internal.
Related links
Enclosures
Backplanes
Backplanes
You can view the Backplane object by expanding the controller and connector object in the Storage
Management tree view. Storage Management displays the status of the backplane and the attached
physical disks. Backplane is similar to an enclosure. In a Backplane, the controller connector and physical
disks are attached to the enclosure, but it does not have the management features (temperature probes,
alarms, and so on) associated with external enclosures.
Flexible Backplane Zoning
Flexible backplane zoning is a functionality introduced in Storage Management that allows you to
connect two PERC hardware controllers to the backplane or internal drive-array by using a single
expander. This configuration enables Storage Management to split the backplane between the two PERC
hardware controllers, as a result of that increasing the performance of the system. When flexible
backplane zoning is enabled, the backplanes display the same backplane ID for all backplanes connected
to the two PERC hardware controllers. In flexible backplane zoning, physical disks and virtual disks
connected to the first controller is not displayed on the second controller and the other way around. For
example, If you have to create a virtual disk using the first controller, only the physical disks connected to
the first controller is enumerated and available for the operation. The same is applicable when you view
the Slot Occupancy Report for a particular controller.
The Flexible backplane zoning feature is only supported on backplanes of 24 slots—PowerEdge R630 and
R730xd. If the backplane consists of 26 slots, in the case of PowerEdge R730xd, the additional two slots
located next to the rear ports are not considered in this configuration.
If a PCIe SSD Extender card is connected to the backplane, then the PCIe SSD slots are excluded from the
zone, because NVMe drives are not supported in flexible backplane zoning. The configurations supported
are: 12+12, 16+8, 8+16, 20+4, and 4+20. For example, In the 16+8 configuration, 16 slots are assigned or
connected to the first controller and the remaining 8 slots are automatically connected to the second
controller.
NOTE: Flexible backplane zoning can be configured only through RACADM and not through
Storage Management.
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