User`s guide

5.2.4 Integrated Striping Overview

This section provides an overview of the LSI Logic Integrated Striping (IS) feature.

5.2.4.1 Introduction

The LSI Logic Integrated Striping (IS) feature is useful for applications that require the faster performance

and increased storage capacity of striping. The low-cost IS feature has many of the advantages of a more

expensive RAID striping solution. A single IS logical drive may be configured as the boot disk or as a data

disk.

The IS feature is implemented with controller firmware that supports the Fusion-MPT Interface. IS

provides better performance and more capacity than individual disks, without burdening the host CPU. The

firmware splits host I/Os over multiple disks and presents the disks as a single logical drive. In general,

striping is transparent to the BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.

The SAS BIOS CU is used to configure IS volumes, which can consist of two to eight disks.

Note

Integrated Mirroring and Integrated Striping volumes can be configured on the same LSI logic SAS

controller.

5.2.4.2 IS Features

Integrated Striping supports the following features:

z Support for volumes with two to eight drives

z Support for two IS volumes, with up to 10 drives total, on a controller. An IS volume can also be

combined with an IM or IME volume.

Note

Currently available LSI Logic SAS controllers support a maximum of eight drives.

All drives in a volume must be connected to the same SAS controller.

Presents a single virtual drive to the OS for each configured volume

z Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although the two types of drives cannot be combined in

one volume

z Fusion-MPT architecture

z Easy-to-use SAS BIOS configuration utility

z Error notification

z Use of metadata to store volume configuration on disks

z OS-specific event log

z Error display inside the Fusion-MPT BIOS

z SES status LED support for drives used in IS volumes