HP ProLiant DL585 G7 server technology

The Array Configuration Utility (ACU) lets you combine any two RAID 0 arrays of the same size and

select which drive contains the data to keep. This feature is only available offline. You must boot to

the Smart Start CD and run ACU from there. Typically, you use this feature when testing out a

software patch. You could split the mirror as a means to save the current data and then perform any

type of destructive software update necessary, keeping the resulting data set or reverting back to the

old data. BBWC is not required to enable this feature.

Capacity expansion is the adding of configured physical drives to the array. The logical drives (or

volumes) that exist in an array before the expansion takes place remain unchanged, and only the

amount of free space in the array changes. BBWC is required for this feature.

All Smart Array controllers use the same configuration utility and diagnostic software, Array

Configuration Utility (ACU) and management software (HP Insight Manager). In addition, the SA-

P410 provides Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA) that allows a simplified configuration

tool at the time of controller boot.

Serial Attached SCSI

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) leverages a common electrical and physical connection interface with

Serial ATA (SATA), while offering logical SCSI compatibility and SCSI reliability, performance, and

manageability. SAS provides investment protection in compatible SCSI software and middleware. It

gives you the choice of direct-attach storage devices (SAS or SATA).

In addition, SAS offers greater performance, longer cabling distances, smaller form factors, and

greater addressability, all leading to a new level of flexibility when you deploy mainstream data

center servers and subsystems. This compatibility provides you with many choices for server and

storage subsystem deployment by leveraging the SATA development effort on smaller cable

connectors. This design provides customers a downstream compatibility with desktop class ATA

technologies.

SAS and SATA Small Form Factor hard drives

The SAS architecture enables system designs that deploy high-performance SAS and high-capacity

SATA Small Form Factor (SFF) drives. This capability provides a broad range of storage solutions that

give IT managers the flexibility to choose storage devices based on reliability, performance, and cost.

SFF drives provide higher performance than large form factor drives. The smaller SFF platters reduce

seek times because the heads have a shorter distance to travel. RAID performance improves by

increasing the numbers of spindles.

HP ships SATA drives with Drive Write Cache (DWC) disabled. Selecting the preset configuration

provides greater safety for drive data in case of sudden power loss and when there is no battery on

the controller to protect the cache. Enabling DWC may result in data loss if power is lost to the server

and there is no power protection configured for the server.

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) increases SATA HDD performance by internally prioritizing read

and write command execution. This reduces unnecessary drive head movement and results in

increased performance especially in server or storage-type applications with outstanding multiple

simultaneous read/write requests. Without NCQ, the drive can process and complete only one

command at a time. In order to use NCQ, both the controller and the drive have to support it. Please

see the SATA Hard Drive QuickSpecs for specific SATA hard drive capacities that support NCQ.

Networking technologies

The DL585 G7 includes an integrated NC375i network controller. The NC375i is a quad port

Gigabit Server Adapter that allows access to four 1GbE ports. The NC375i has an eight lane (x8)