Storage Considerations; Xseries Storage Solutions - IBM 88553RX Installation Manual

3.3 Storage considerations

When you are planning the storage configuration to accompany the x455, there
are important performance and sizing issues that need to be considered.
The two internal hot-swap 1" drive bays will typically be used for operating
system installation. We recommend that these drives be configured as a
two-drive RAID-1 array to provide a higher degree of system availability. Drives
up to 15,000 RPM and the converged tray design are supported. To configure
RAID-1, you can use the internal LSI controller that is provided onboard or buy
an optional ServeRAID adapter.
Typically the x455 will be attached to an external disk enclosure for data storage
requirements. Some of the supported IBM storage options are:
SCSI RAID adapters and storage enclosures
Fibre Channel adapters and Storage Area Networks (SANs)
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
SCSI over IP (iSCSI)
IBM Enterprise Storage Server® (ESS)
ESCON® connectivity to a zSeries server
Note: You can also add as an option an LS-120 diskette drive that can be
used to upgrade the firmware or the EFI version. Please note that no diskette
drive is provided with the default configuration, and that this solution is not
supported.

3.3.1 xSeries storage solutions

This section discusses some of the available xSeries storage solutions and
related technologies, as well as tape backup and performance considerations.
All the IBM Storage Solutions are supported under Linux, as well as under
Windows. For more information see:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/linux
ServeRAID with external storage enclosures
The x455 currently only supports the ServeRAID 4Mx and 6M.
The ServeRAID-4Mx is a 66 MHz PCI adapter and features two Ultra160
SCSI channels, 64 MB of battery-backed up ECC SDRAM cache memory,
and an Intel 100 MHz i80303 processor. Up to 28 Ultra160 and Ultra2 SCSI
devices are supported.
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Chapter 3. Planning