Sun Microsystems CP32x0 manual RAID Support, SAS Bios Overview

3.1RAID Support

The LSISAS1068e controller supports the Integrated RAID hardware solution, which is a highly integrated, low-cost RAID solution. It is designed for systems requiring redundancy and high availability, but not requiring a full-featured RAID implementation.

Integrated RAID includes Integrated Mirroring (IM or RAID 1), Integrated Mirroring Extended (IME), and Integrated Striping (IS or RAID 0) technology. Integrated RAID is OS independent, easy to install and configure, and does not require a special driver. A RAID Volume is seen as a single drive by the host BIOS and OS.

The LSISAS1068e controller is based on the Fusion-MPT (Message Passing Technology) architecture. The Fusion-MPT architecture requires only a thin device driver that is independent of the I/O bus. LSI Logic provides the device drivers for various operating environments.

3.2SAS BIOS Overview

The SAS BIOS is the bootable ROM code that manages SAS hardware resources. It is specific to a family of LSI Logic Fusion-MPT SAS controllers or processors. The Fusion-MPT SAS BIOS integrates with a standard system BIOS, extending the standard disk service routine provided through INT13h.

During the boot time initialization, the SAS BIOS determines whether the system BIOS has already installed other hard disks, such as an IDE drive. If such drives are already installed, the SAS BIOS maps any SAS drives it finds behind these drives. Otherwise, the SAS BIOS installs drives starting with the system boot drive. In this case, the system boots from a drive controlled by the SAS BIOS.

The Fusion-MPT SAS BIOS features include:

■Configuration for up to 256 adapters; any four can be chosen for INT13 (bootrom) support

■Support for Message Passing Technology (MPT)

■Support for LSI53C1064 devices

■Support for SAS devices

■Support for Integrated RAID initialization (with proper firmware)

3-2Netra CP32x0 SAS Storage Advanced Rear Transition Module HD User’s Guide • January 2009