Education
Servicing the IBM ServeRAID-8k
Serial-Attached SCSI Controller
Study guide
XW5078
Release 1.00
Servicing the IBM ServeRAID-8k
Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) Controller
Overview
The ServeRAID 8k controller provides a full function RAID solution for mainstream systems and BSE-3 Blade option that are SAS and SATA based. The controller has 256MBs of memory. This increased memory provides data protection. The ServeRAID 8k can be added to a supported system to upgrade the Host RAID controller. The controller supports
Copyback which rebuilds your original array after replacement of failed drive. It supports RAID level 6 for Dual Parity of down drives. The ServeRAID 8k controller has a higher speed processor which increases it performance up to 50% depending on the application of the controller. It supports Hot Swap Rebuild. When a bad hard drive is replaced, Hot Swap Rebuild allows the new hard drive to be automatically detected and rebuilt when it is
inserted. The ServeRAID 8k also supports Identify Drives, Logical Drive Migration and Data Consistency. It is RoHs compliant
Lithium battery
The ServeRAID 8k uses a lithium battery. If a power failure or outage occurs the lithium battery would protect the data being stored in the ServeRAID cache memory. The write-back setting of the write-cache mode must be used.
Figure 2 - ServeRAID 8k Serial Attached SCSI Controller Battery
Features
ServeRAID 8k SAS Controller
Cache memory 256MB 522MHz DDR2 ECC Write Back Cache with Battery backup capability
# of SCSI channels internal and external
0 Failover No Cluster support No
PCI Support RoMB PCI-E v 1.0a
Batter backup life 72 hours Supported RAID levels RAID 0, 1,1E, 10, 5, 6 Max # of hard disk drives 64
Max # of logical drives 24
Utilities CLI and ARCCONF ServeRAID Management
S/W
ServeRAID Manager
Host Bus Interface 64 MHz, 133 MHz PCI-X version 1.0a Operating System support Windows 2000, 2003, Linux
Supported systems x3500, x3550, x3650, x3755, x3655, BSE-3
Table 1 - ServeRAID 8k SAS Controller Features
Note: While the ServeRAID8k supports 24 logical drives, it only supports 10 logical drives per physical drive. You would need 3 physical drives to create 24 logical drives.
Updating BIOS and firmware
The IBM ServeRAID support CD is used to update the firmware and BIOS of the
ServeRAID 8k controller. For more information on how to do this refer to the ServeRAID-8i, ServeRAID-8k, and ServeRAID-8k-l Serial-Attached SCSI Controllers IBM Installation guide.
Installing device drivers
The ServeRAID 8k has device driver support in the following operating systems:
• Windows 2000
• Windows 2003
• Linux (including distribution DD)
• VMware
For detailing information on how to install the drivers for the ServeRAID 8k please refer to the ServeRAID-8i, ServeRAID-8k, and ServeRAID-8k-l Serial-Attached SCSI
Controllers IBM Installation guide.
RAID Configurations
The ServeRAID 8k can be used to upgrade ServeRAID 8e HostRAID. ServeRAID 8e or HostRAID adds RAID functionality to the SATA and/or SCSI controller by supporting RAID levels 0 and 1. HostRAID can be upgraded by installing the ServeRAID 8k which would provide RAID levels RAID 0, 1,1E, 10, 5, 6.
The ServeRAID 8k controller can also be used to upgrade the ServeRAID 8k-l controller. For example there are two RAID levels available for the x3650 system and they are as follows:
• ServeRAID 8e HostRAID provided standard
• ServeRAID 8k (optional) can be installed for higher performance and RAID 5 or 6 The base configuration for the x3650 would be ServeRAID 8k-l which has the following:
• Integrated Mirroring and Striping
• ServeRAID subset (RAID 0, 1,10)
• No cache
• No battery
Upgrading the configuration of the x3650 to the ServeRAID 8k would provide the following:
• Enhanced RAID
• Full RAID 0, 1,5,6,10
• 256 MB DDR2 memory DIMM
• Battery Back Up
RAID level 6 Dual-Parity
RAID level 6 offers extremely high fault tolerance. In RAID level 6, data is striped across several physical drives and dual parity is used to store and recover data. The failure of two drives in the array can be tolerated by RAID level 6. This also allows the use of ATA and SATA disks to store data. ATA and SATA disks are more cost effective. RAID level 6 uses a second parity scheme that is distributed across different drives. Writes in this case will
Summary
Having completed this course you are now able to:
1) Provide a high-level overview of the ServeRAID 8k 2) Provide a high-level overview of the Lithium battery
3) Provide where to find out how to upgrade the BIOS and firmware 4) Provide where to find out how to load the driver
