Meridian Data 1 manual Architectural Description, Highlights, Subsystem and Controller Features

Architectural Description

The Astra ES is a Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host, SAS+SATA disk, subsystem suitable for Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), and Expanded Storage.

Only hard disk drives from Excel Meridian Data are approved for use in this solution.

All enclosures include a mid-plane, RAID controller, power and cooling units, and enclosure processor all in one cable-less chassis design. Multiple fans and power supplies provide redundancy to ensure continued usage during component failure. The RAID controller is hardware based and controls all logical drive functions transparently to the host system. Astra ES appears to the computer’s operating system as a standard SCSI drive or drives.

Features and Benefits

Highlights

•Dual channel active/active, failover/failback RAID controllers

•12 hot-swappable drive bays in a robust 2U rackmount chassis with redundant, hot-swappable power and cooling modules

•Supports for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) 3 Gb/s drives simultaneously in the same system—choose the drive that is best suited to your application

•Dual Fibre Channel and SAS host ports provide high-availability SAN and cluster-friendly platform

•JBOD expansion support through a 3 Gb/s SAS x4 port—up to four Astra ES JBOD systems

•Simplified remote management with a comprehensive embedded web-based management via Ethernet— Astra ES Management GUI.

•Five years complete system limited warranty including email and phone support with highly experienced technical support technicians.

•Resilient data protection features such as Predictive Data Migration™ and PerfectRAID™ provide rock solid data protection

•LUN Mapping and Masking bring flexibility for multiple application and OS support on the same storage subsystem

•Open architecture, industry’s most comprehensive support for SAS and SATA hard drives and standards- based management interfaces

•Support for the industry standard Disk Data Format (DDF from SNIA) ensures interoperability and drive roaming even among different RAID vendors

•Compatible with leading SAS hard drives, host bus adapters and RAID controllers

Subsystem and Controller Features

Controllers: Dual-controller configuration or single-controller configuration, upgradeable to dual. Dual-controller subsystems feature Active/Active, Failover/Failback.

Drive Support: Up to twelve 3.5" x 1" hard disk drives: SAS 3Gb/s, SATA II 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s. SATA drives require a MUX Adapter in dual I/O module configuration (dual-controller) subsystems.

Supports any mix of SAS and SATA II 3Gb/s or 1.5Gb/s drives simultaneously in the same system. Staggered physical drive spin-up.

External I/O Ports (per controller): Dual 4-Gb Fibre Channel host port; One external 3 Gb/s SAS x4 ports for JBOD expansion (up to four Astra ES JBOD Systems).

Data Cache: Shared 512 MB predictive data cache (expandable to 2 GB); Automatic write cache destaging; 72- hour battery backup (for 512 MB cache).

Command Queue Depth: 512 commands per Astra ES system (up to 1024 commands with 512 MB memory).

Operational Features

RAID Levels: RAID 0, 1, 1E, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 – Any combination of these RAID levels can exist at the same time.

SECURSTOR ASTRA ES 9