Functional And Operational Characteristics; System Architecture Overview; Hardware Architecture; Raid Implementation Overview - HP XP7 Owner's Manual

2 Functional and operational characteristics

System architecture overview

This section briefly describes the architecture of the HP XP7 disk array.

Hardware architecture

The basic system architecture is shown in the following diagram.
Figure 5 HP XP7 architecture overview
The system consists of two main hardware assemblies:
A controller chassis that contains the logic and processing components
A drive chassis that contains the disk drives or solid state drives.
These assemblies are explained briefly in
components" (page

RAID implementation overview

This section provides an overview of the implementation of RAID technology on the HP XP7 disk
array.

Array groups and RAID levels

The array group (also called parity group) is the basic unit of storage capacity for the HP XP7 disk
array. Each array group is attached to both boards of a DKA pair over 2 SAS paths, which enables
all data drives in the array group to be accessed simultaneously by a DKA pair. Each controller
rack has two drive chassis (factory designation DKU), and each drive chassis can have up to 128
physical data drives.
"Introduction" (page
54).
6), and in detail in "System
System architecture overview 17