HP LH4r HP NetRAID Product Paper

product paper

HP NetRAID

March 1997

Introduction

The HP NetRAID Adapter is a high-performance,

intelligent PCI-to-SCSI host adapter with RAID

control capabilities. RAID has become a

necessity for high-availability server

environments. These environments require

effective solutions in such areas as performance,

data protection, reliability, availability, and

management. The NetRAID Adapter provides

these solutions. This paper introduces you to the

features that the NetRAID Adapter provides,

including new RAID levels, online capacity

expansion, RAID level migration, drive roaming,

and battery backup for cache memory.

Understanding these innovative features will help

you determine how you can best use them in your

network environment.

Data Organization

Data organization techniques determine how data

is stored on disks. Ultimately your choices about

how disks are used to store data influence your

server’s performance, data protection

capabilities, flexibility, reliability, and ease of

configuration and management. A disk subsystem

with no data protection is sometimes labeled

“JBOD” for “Just a Bunch of Disks.” With JBOD,

if a drive fails, its data is gone. As an alternative

to JBOD, two data protection schemes—

mirroring

and

duplexing—

provide data

protection by storing identical information on

pairs of drives (mirroring) or pairs of controllers

(duplexing). These techniques protect data in the

event of a drive or controller failure but require a

drive space overhead of 100%.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)

A set

of techniques allows drives to be logically

grouped in a way that reduces the drive space

overhead while still providing comprehensive

data protection, and sometimes providing a

performance advantage as well. With names like

RAID-0, RAID-1, and so on, these disk

management techniques have become popular

because of their smaller requirements for

overhead space. RAID can provide mirroring and

duplexing (both are known as RAID-1) as well as

more sophisticated methods for enhancing

performance, capacity, and data integrity.

The Hewlett-Packard NetRAID Adapter

With the

NetRAID Adapter, HP provides a leading disk

array solution, adding new levels of performance,

availability, flexibility, and management. This

important advancement allows you to build the

highest levels of availability and performance

into your HP NetServer disk subsystem. The HP

NetRAID Adapter is a three-channel, Ultra-SCSI

disk array controller (DAC) providing features

such as additional RAID levels (RAID-10, RAID-

30, and RAID-50), online capacity expansion,

RAID level migration, drive roaming, battery

backup for cache, and an audible alarm. HP

NetRAID also includes the HP NetRAID

Assistant, an object-oriented graphical user

interface (GUI) for configuration and

management of the storage solution. Additionally,

it offers comprehensive management through

integration with HP NetServer Assistant or by

way of a remote console interface.

HP LH4r HP NetRAID Product Paper

HP LH4r - NetServer - 256 MB RAM Manual

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