Datasheet

Page 1 ©2014 Super Micro Computer, Inc. August 2014
Supermicro’s Storage AOC
Introduction
Supermicro has been and continues to employ and deliver storage
products with the latest storage technologies. Supermicro’s Add-On-Card
(AOC) product is one example of this. The product line oerings are in
three categories:
• HBA – Host Bus Adapter where each physical device (i.e. PD) is
presented to OS separately. If two PDs are connected to an HBA then OS
will see two distinct devices.
• SW RAID – These AOCs are very similar to the architecture which is
used in the HBA except they support minimal amount of RAID features
(i.e. 0, 1 and 10). Both AOC as well as mother board’s (i.e. MB) resources
are used to process data. More than one PD can be congured into a
virtual device (i.e. VD). The operating system (i.e. OS) will see VDs as
distinct devices.
• RAID On Chip (i.e. ROC) based RAID – These cards are rich in RAID
features. They support RAID level 0,1,10,5,6,50 and 60. This AOC contains
cache memory and cache memory protection (i.e. Battery Back Unite (i.e.
BBU) or Cachevault (Supecap+TFM)).
Features
• HBA (IT mode) –
This AOC provides one-to-one mapping of PDs (i.e. Physical
Devices) and exports them back to the OS. It does not provide
any RAID feature. It supports 8 devices if it is directly connected
to a DA (i.e. Direct attached) backplane that would also support
8 devices. It however can support 122 or more PDs if it is
connected to a backplane that uses an expander. The higher
device support is possible by using the logic in the backplane
expander. This AOC provides to the OS, all distinct devices that
it can find. The OS can either use them as individual devices
or use SW RAID to create OS level VDs that utilizes a desired
RAID levels. Higher number of devices can be configured by
using just a bunch of devices (i.e. JBOD – SMCI defines this as a
chassis that is externally available for storage scalability). These
JOBDs can be chained for scalability and grow a capacity in a
enterprise software that can handle on-the-fly scalability
such as hadoop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop) ,
Swift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack) and many
other OpenSource Scalable storage products. This card does
not need cache therefore no cache protection (i.e. BBU) is
required.
• SW RAID (IR mode) –
This AOC provides minimal RAID features (i.e. RAID 0,1 and
10) and exports them in the form of VDs (i.e. Virtual Devices)
back to the OS. Each VD is made of several PDs. For example a
VD could be 3 PDs that are configured as RAID 0. It supports 8
devices if it is directly connected to a DA backplane that would
also support 8 devices. You are allowed to have upto 8 PDs in
each VD and upto 2 VDs. It however can support 63 or more
PDs if it is connected to a backplane that uses an expander.
In this case you are allowed to have 14 PDs in each VD and
upto 2 VDs . Higher number of devices are possible by using
the logic in both the backplane expander FW (i.e. Firmware –
software residing on the hardware) and AOC’s. Higher number
of VDs could be configured by using drive groups (i.e. DG ) and
expander based JBOD chassis. SMCI defines JBOD as a expander
based chassis that is externally available for storage scalability.
This card does not need cache therefore no cache protection
(i.e. BBU) is required. A user’s guide is also available at SMCI’s ftp
site (ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/LSI/LSI_SAS_EmbMRAID_
SWUG.pdf).
• ROC based RAID –
This AOC uses RAID On Chip (i.e. ROC chip) to provide full
RAID features (i.e. RAID 0,1, 10, 6,5,50,60) in the form of
VDs (i.e. Virtual Devices) and exports them back to the
OS. It supports 8 devices if it is directly connected to a DA
backplane that would also support 8 devices. You are allowed
to have upto 8 PDs in each VD and upto 8 VDs.