Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1. Product Overview
1.1.1 Product Introduction
This hardware manual briefly introduces the SentinelRAID 170 (SR 170) 320MB/second SCSI (SCSI-320) -to-SCSI RAID controller shown in Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1: SentinelRAID SCSI-to-SCSI RAID Controller
The SR 170 controller is designed to meet the high availability, high performance, and extreme fault tolerant demands placed on RAID controllers operating in today’s most extreme storage environments. The controller uses RAID technology to endow a host system with high-speed, fault-tolerant disk storage operation. The SR 170 controller is an ideal solution for weaving multiple hard drives into one or more contiguous volumes as well as enhancing storage availability, integrity, and performance.
With high-speed SDRAM modules and firmware in flash memory, a PowerPC® RISC CPU performs all RAID functions on the SR 170 controller, which supports RAID 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5, 10, 30, 50, or JBOD RAID storage to any host system equipped with a SCSI- 320 interface. The controller’s operation is completely independent of the host operating system.
Four VHDCI SCSI connectors at the back of the controller board facilitate the connection of the four SCSI-320 I/O channels to external hosts and drives. All the I/O channels can be configured either as host or drive. Other external interfaces include two COM ports and an RJ-45 Ethernet connector. The COM 1 port is used for serial communications and