Channel

An electrical path for the transfer of data and control information between

 

a disk and a disk controller.

Consistency

An examination of the disk system to determine whether all conditions

Check

are valid for the specified configuration (such as parity.)

Cold Swap

A cold swap requires that you turn the power off before replacing a

 

defective disk drive in a disk subsystem.

Data Transfer

The amount of data per unit time moved through a channel. For disk I/O,

Capacity

data transfer capacity (bandwidth) is expressed in megabytes per second

 

(Mbytes/s).

Degraded

Used to describe a disk drive that has become non-functional or has

 

decreased in performance.

Disk

A nonvolatile, randomly addressable, rewritable mass storage device,

 

including both rotating magnetic and optical disks and solid-state disks,

 

or nonvolatile electronic storage elements. It does not include specialized

 

devices such as write-once-read-many (WORM) optical disks, nor does

 

it include so-called RAM disks implemented using software to control a

 

dedicated portion of a host computer volatile random access memory.

Disk Array

A collection of disks from one or more disk subsystems combined with

 

array management software. The software controls the disks and

 

presents them to the array operating environment as one or more virtual

 

disks.

Disk Duplexing

A variation on disk mirroring in which a second disk adapter or host

 

adapter and redundant disk drives are present.

Disk Mirroring

Writing duplicate data to more than one (usually two) disk drives to

 

protect against data loss in the event of device failure. Disk mirroring is

 

a common feature of RAID systems.

Disk Spanning

Disk spanning allows multiple disk drives to function like one big drive.

 

Spanning overcomes lack of disk space and simplifies storage

 

management by combining existing resources or adding relatively

 

inexpensive resources. For example, four 36 Gbyte disk drives can be

 

combined to appear to the operating system as one single 144 Gbyte

 

drive. See also Array Spanning and Spanning.

Disk Striping

A type of disk array mapping. Consecutive stripes of data are mapped

 

round-robin to consecutive array members. A striped array (RAID 0)

C-2

Glossary

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