Intel RAID High Availability Storage Solution white paper

Intel® RAID High Available Solution List of Figures
Revision 1.0 Intel Confidential 7
1. Introduction
1.1 Background
The Intel RAID High Availability (HA) Solution is designed for small-to-medium businesses,
remote/branch offices or private cloud environments that need a high availability configuration of
a server with local storage. This configuration of the Intel RAID HA solution provides two
servers, two hardware RAID controllers and shared local storage with SAS disk drives. This
solution takes advantage of Microsoft Windows Failover clustering technology to provide the
high availability environment in a two-node cluster and takes advantage of the SAS interface to
allow sharing of storage. The overall design goal is to provide the high availability solution with a
simple installation and ease-of-use experience for the user or value-added-reseller.
1.2 Requirements and Configuration Diagram
The Intel RAID HA solution requires the following:
 Two Intel servers (R2312 or equivalent)
 Two Intel hardware RAID Controllers (RS25SB008) plus the enablement key for
each controller (AXXRPFKHA2)
 The AXXRPFKHA2 enablement key kit which contains 2 keys, 1 key for each
controller
 External JBOD (JBOD2224S2DP)
 Supported SAS disk drives that are SCSI3-PR Compliant (SATA drives are not
supported, see the Tested Hardware and OS List for the RAID controller on
support.Intel.com.)
 SAS cables connecting the servers to the JBOD storage unit
 Microsoft Windows Server 2012 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Failover
Cluster Server support
 Support for a private network connection between the two servers
 Support for a public network connection for each server
 Active directory support for the two servers
 A DNS server located on the public network
This solution fits into a typical infrastructure and includes “server node 1,” “server node 2” and
the “External JBOD SAS Drive Enclosure” as indicated in the diagram below. As with any server
cluster solution, there needs to be a private LAN dedicated to cluster server communications in
addition to the public LAN that communicates with client systems. The public network must
provide Domain and Active Directory services, as well as DNS services to the failover cluster
server.