User guide

9
How the SiI 4726 Storage Appliance operates
The SiI 4726 architecture (Figure 1) supports configuration and management of multiple
storage devices connected to a single host. Its built-in features include RAID configuration,
disk rebuild, and virtualization capabilities. Disk virtualization uses the SiI 4726’s innovative
SteelVine processor technology to map the physical drives to virtual drives for optimal storage.
Figure 1: Basic SiI 4726 operation
FAST
striping
Safe
mirroring
Big
concatenation
Physical Drives
In its basic form, the SiI 4726 Storage Appliance supports individual mapping of a hard disk drive to a
corresponding volume or virtual drive.
Using complex mapping options, the physical drives can be concatenated and mapped to virtual drives
in several ways to implement FAST, SAFE, or BIG storage policies, as described in the next section.
Depending on the end-user’s choice, the data is written to one or more disks sequentially or
simultaneously.
The SiI 4726 Manager User’s Guide assumes that end-users are using the SV-HBA3124-4 host bus
adapter and driver, which provide port multiplier support as a SATA host. Refer to “Install the SiI 4726
hardware
” for more information on running the SiI 4726 Storage Appliance with other hosts that may not
support port multipliers.