ATTO Technology Diamond Storage Array S-Class Installation And Operating Manual page 15

disk array that uses the merged power of ATA disk
drives.
The heart of the Diamond
Intelligent Midplane
Series disk storage array is the intelligent
midplane with ADXT to sum or aggregate the
data rates of individual ATA disk drives to create
high data transfer rates. This technology enables
features such as serverless backup, advanced error
protection, metadata storage techniques,
virtualization software, thermal management and
advanced enclosure services.
The midplane contains a combination of custom
Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs),
processors and proprietary embedded software. It
is divided into three main processing sections
which handle the data being read or written to the
ATA disk drives from the Fibre Channel or SCSI
host interfaces. The Virtual Device Manager
(VDM), Data Routing Fabric (DRF) and ATA
Interface Engines (AIE) organize data streams for
storage or retrieval.
Virtual Device Manager
virtual devices using an implementation of the
standard SCSI protocol controlled by the Virtual
Device Manager. The VDM adds capabilities
such as RAID, data management services,
Data is accessed through
Disk 2 Disk 2 Disk 2 Disk 2
Disk 1 Disk 1 Disk 1 Disk 1
AIE AIE AIE AIE
1 2 3
enclosure management services, serverless
backup, data replication and LUN mapping.
Data Routing Fabric
routed between the ATA Interface Engines (AIE)
and the Fibre Channel or SCSI interface by the
custom Data Routing Fabric ASIC, a high speed,
low latency transfer fabric with more than 2
GB/sec. of bandwidth supported by up to 512
Megabytes of memory.
ATA Interface Engine (AIE)
pair of drives is through a custom ATA Interface
Engine ASIC. The AIE implements the typically
software-intensive ATA interface completely in
silicon. Each AIE contains a dedicated ATA
protocol processor to completely automate
command and protocol processing. Automated
command overlapping and queuing maximizes
the performance of multi-threaded I/O. The AIE
transfers data using double-clocking technology
at 66 megabytes per second. The Diamond
Storage Array contains 12 AIEs for a parallel
transfer rate of 792 megabytes per second. In
addition to guaranteeing data transfer integrity
with automatic CRC checking, the command and
status transfers are validated using a patent
pending technology unique to the AIE.
Disk 2 Disk 2 Disk 2 Disk 2
Disk 1 Disk 1 Disk 1 Disk 1
AIE AIE AIE AIE
4 5 6 7
DATA ROUTING FABRIC
text
VIRTUAL DEVICE MANAGER
FIBRECHANNEL FIBRECHANNEL
INTERFACE 1 INTERFACE 2
Incoming or outgoing data is
The interface to each
Disk 2 Disk 2 Disk 2 Disk 2
Disk 1 Disk 1 Disk 1 Disk 1
AIE AIE AIE AIE
8 9 10 11 12
4