Accusys ExaRAID GUI - Manual (Page 26)

Introduction
1-1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Congratulations on your purchase of our RAID controller. Aiming at
serving versatile applications, the RAID controller ensures not only data
reliability but also improves system availability. Supported with cutting-
edge IO processing technologies, the RAID controller delivers outstanding
performance and helps to build dependable systems for heavy-duty
computing, workgroup file sharing, service-oriented enterprise
applications, online transaction processing, uncompressed video editing,
or digital content provisioning. With its advanced storage management
capabilities, the RAID controller is an excellent choice for both on-line
and near-line storage applications. The following sections in this chapter
will present an overview of features of the RAID controller, and for more
information about its features and benefits, please see Appendix B.
1.1 Overview
• Seasoned Reliability
The RAID controller supports various RAID levels, 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and including
multi-level RAID, like RAID 10, 30, 50, and 60, which perfectly balances
performance and reliability. To further ensure the long-term data integrity,
the controller provides extensive maintenance utilities, like periodic
SMART monitoring, disk cloning, and disk scrubbing to proactively prevent
performance degradation or data loss due to disk failure or latent bad
sectors.
The controller also supports multi-path I/O (MPIO) solutions tolerating path
failure and providing load balance among multiple host connections for
higher availability and performance. Together with active-active
redundant-controller configuration, the RAID system offers high
availability without single point of failure.
• Great Flexibility and Scalability
Nowadays, IT staff is required to make the most from the equipments
purchased, and thus easier sharing and better flexibility is a must for
business-class storage systems. The RAID controller allows different RAID
configurations, like RAID levels, stripe sizes, and caching policies, to be
deployed independently for different logical units on single disk group,
such that the storage resources can be utilized efficiently by fulfilling
different requirements.
As business grows or changes during the lifetime of storage systems, the
requirements are very likely to be changed, and the users need to
reconfigure the system to support the business dynamics while
maintaining normal operations. The RAID controller allows capacity
expansion by adding more disk drives or expansion chassis.