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D-2 Sun Fire V20z and Sun Fire V40z Servers—User Guide • March 2005
D.1.1 LSI Logic’s Integrated RAID Solution
LSI Logic offers an integrated RAID solution by simplifying the IM configuration
options and by providing firmware support in its host adapters. The software
continuously monitors IM volumes and reports status and error conditions as they
occur.
Integrated RAID provides the following benefits:
■ A low-cost solution.
■ Easy to use, install and configure.
■ The system can boot from an IM or IS volume.
■ No special operating-system-specific software is required.
■ High reliability and data integrity.
■ Low host CPU and PCI bus utilization.
■ Fusion-MPT architecture provides processing power.
Note – LSI Logic provides a BIOS-based configuration utility that enables you to
configure the mirroring attributes during initial setup and to reconfigure them in
response to hardware failures or changes in the environment. Refer to Appendix D
of this guide for more information about this utility.
D.1.2 Integrated Mirroring
With traditional mirroring (or RAID1), a drive has its data duplicated on two
different drives using either a hardware RAID controller or software (generally by
means of the OS). If either drive fails, the other continues to function as a single
drive until the failed drive is replaced.
With integrated mirroring enhanced (IME) (also referred to as either Enhanced
RAID1 or RAID1E), instead of being able to use only two drives, you can use two to
six drives, including the option of only using an odd number of drives. Instead of
mirroring at the disk level, the data is mirrored in stripes across the drives. Thus,
IME allows for more flexibility with mirroring data.
The LSI Logic Integrated Mirroring (IM) feature provides data protection for the
system boot volume to safeguard critical information such as the OS on servers.
Integrated mirroring provides simultaneous mirroring on configurations of two to
six disks, to assure fault-tolerant, high-availability data.
If a disk fails, the hot-swap capability allows the system to be easily restored by
simply swapping disks. The system then automatically re-mirrors the swapped disk.
Additionally, the hot spare feature keeps one disk ready to automatically replace a
failed disk in the volume, making the system even more fault-tolerant.