IBM DS8000 - Manual (Page 52)

30 DS8000 Series: Concepts and Architecture
Figure 2-7 I/O enclosures
Each I/O enclosure has the following attributes:
4U rack-mountable enclosure
Six PCI-X slots: 3.3 V, keyed, 133 MHz blind-swap hot-plug
Default redundant hot-plug power and cooling devices
Two RIO-G and two SPCN ports
2.4 Disk subsystem
The DS8000 series offers a selection of Fibre Channel disk drives, including 300 GB drives,
allowing a DS8100 to scale up to 115.2 TB of capacity and a DS8300 to scale up to 192 TB of
capacity. The disk subsystem consists of three components:
First, located in the I/O enclosures are the device adapters. These are RAID controllers
that are used by the storage images to access the RAID arrays.
Second, the device adapters connect to switched controller cards in the disk enclosures.
This creates a switched Fibre Channel disk network.
Finally, we have the disks themselves. The disks are commonly referred to as disk drive
modules (DDMs).
2.4.1 Device adapters
Each DS8000 device adapter (DA) card offers four 2Gbps FC-AL ports. These ports are used
to connect the processor complexes to the disk enclosures. The adapter is responsible for
managing, monitoring, and rebuilding the RAID arrays. The adapter provides remarkable
performance thanks to a new high function/high performance ASIC. To ensure maximum data
Single I/O enclosure
Two I/O enclosures
side by side
Front view
Rear view
Redundant
power supplies
RIO-G
ports
SPCN
ports
Slots: 1 2 3 4 5 6