click pics to enlarge - RAID and Fibre Channel controllers
Performance? Two HSG80 RAID controllers with 256MB cache each run 6 channels of Ultra3 SCSI into 4x100 Megabyte/sec Fibre Channel Ports. The RAID controllers then connect to a 16 port Fibre Channel Switch which the servers are connected to. Systems connecting to the SAN can use multiple adaptors to get even more bandwidth or redundancy.
Availability? A RAID controller could fail and you’d never know it. With the disaster recovery option we can mirror the contents of this unit to another one up to 10km away and have it failover automatically if this one is totally destroyed. Disk Arrays are of course covered by your usual RAID protection with online hotspares. Wherever there’s a power supply, there are two for redundancy.
Backups? Inbuilt DLT tape library with 10x 70GB DLT Tape capacity and two DLT7000 tape drives. The Tape drives are directly connected to the Fibre Channel so no LAN bandwidth is used during backups. A single library backs up data at 20MB/s allowing you to safely store 700GB of data in around 10 hours – and it changes the tapes for you.
Noise and Cooling? Given that you can have your drives located up to 10km away from your machine, noise shouldn’t be a problem. Cooling is handled within the rack by an impressive collection of fans. Naturally everything is protected by a thermal overload system and all fans are dual redundant and remotely monitored.
That’s all well and good. Enough of the fluff I hear you say. Show me the figures!
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