Specifications

ES/OL
Evaluator Series On-Line™
Storage Systems
Product Analysis
May, 2011
Page 8 of 30
Analysis of Fujitsu ETERNUS DX400 S2
Models DX410 and DX440
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Device Interfaces
Integrated with the controller module, the Device Interface adapters (DIs) connect the disk drives to the
controller modules using a 6 Gb SAS connection. The Model DX410 S2 device adapter has two SAS
connections per controller; the Model DX440 S2 has four SAS connections per controller.
Drive Enclosures
The Fujitsu ETERNUS DX410 S2 and DX440 S2 systems support two types of enclosures:
• 2.5” drive enclosure, 24 slot – 2 I/O modules
• 3
• 3.5” drive enclosure, 12 slot – 2 I/O modules
RAID Groups
Fujitsu supports several RAID group configurations for both traditional and SSD disk devices. The
configurations are shown below in Table 2. The maximum number of RAID groups is dependent upon the
number of disk drives in the system, and the configuration guidelines provided below.
The Fujitsu ETERNUS DX systems utilize RAID groups as the first unit of grouping and data protection. Host
accessible volumes (or LUN’s) are created by aggregating or splitting up RAID groups. Logical volumes are
made available to servers as LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers).
The ETERNUS DX systems support multiple RAID levels and disk combinations, providing different levels of
protection and performance. The RAID levels supported include: RAID0, RAID1, RAID1+0 (data is mirrored on
multiple disks and then striped across 4 to 32 disks), RAID5 with rotating distributed parity on multiple disks,
RAID5+0 (which combines block striping of RAID0 with RAID5 rotating parity) and RAID6 which offers dual
parity per RAID group.
Listed below in Table 2 are the allowable and recommended RAID configurations.
RAID
Drives / RAID Group
Recommended Drives Configuration (Grouping)
RAID0
2 – 16
Not recommended due to no protection!
RAID1
2
2(1D+1M)
RAID1+0
4 – 32
4(2D+2M), 6(3D+3M), 8(4D+4M), 10(5D+5M)
RAID5
3 – 16
3(2D+1P), 4(3D+1P), 5(4D+1P), 6(5D+1P)
RAID5+0
6 – 32
6[(2D+1P)x2], 8[(3D+1P)x2], 10[(4D+1P)x2],
12[(5D+1P)x2]
RAID6
5 – 16
5(3D+2P), 6(4D+2P), 7(5D+2P),
Table 3: Supported RAID Groups and Recommended Configurations
With the release of the “S2” update to the DX410 and DX440, Fujitsu has removed earlier restrictions on the
number of SSD drives supported. A full configuration of SSD drives is now supported, along with the RAID
group configurations outlined above in Table 2.