Storage Processor (Sp) - EMC CX700 Planning Manual

Storage Processor (SP)

Figure 6-3
The SP provides the intelligence of the storage system. Using its own
proprietary software (called FLARE™ Operating Environment), the
SP processes the data written to or read from the disk modules, and
monitors the modules themselves. A CX700 SP consists of a
printed-circuit board with memory modules, a board that provides
SAN features (called a personality board), and status lights.
For Fibre Channel storage systems, each SP has front-end ports to
communicate with switches or servers and back-end ports to
communicate with disks. A CX300 DPE2 SP has two front-end ports
and one back-end port; a CX500/CX500i DPE2 SP has two front-end
ports and two back-end ports; a CX700 SPE SP has four front-end
ports and four back-end ports.
For CX500i storage systems, each SP has two iSCSI front-end ports
that communicate either through a Gigabit Ethernet LAN to clients or
directly to an iSCSI HBA or a Gigabit network interface card (NIC)
card in a client system. Like the CX500, each SP in a CX500i has two
Fibre Channel back-end ports to communicate with disks.
For high availability, a storage system comes with two SPs. The
second SP provides a second route to a storage system and also lets
the storage system use write caching (described in Storage-System
Caching on page 6-6) for enhanced write performance.
Server
LAN/Switch
Path 1
Path 2
SP A SP B
Storage System
Shared Storage Systems
Hardware for CX300, CX500, CX500i, and CX700 Storage Systems
Server Server
LAN/Switch
SP A SP B
Storage System
Storage-System Hardware
EMC1810a
6-5