Introduction; Unmatched Reliability And Performance - 3Ware 7000-2 - Escalade RAID Controller User Manual

Introduction

Introduction

Unmatched reliability and performance

The Escalade 7000 and 8000 series of ATA RAID Controllers bring
new levels of reliability to ATA RAID through a patented switched
architecture that exceeds the reliability of SCSI shared-bus storage
systems. The shared bus architecture of SCSI has inherent perfor-
mance limitations due to arbitration latency and only one drive may
use the bus at any given time. Further, a single drive failure can
bring the entire storage system down. In this scenario, SCSI RAID
features fail to make the data available.
The Escalade 7000 and 8000 series uses a non-blocking switched
architecture to isolate the drives from one another. Any drive failure
makes that drive unavailable and the rest of the storage system
remains undisturbed. In addition, 3ware has implemented
Advanced Data Protection (ADP) features that further protect data
from loss. In ADP Level-1, all drive commands are checked to
ensure that no command corruption has taken place over the entire
data path, guaranteeing that the command and data reach the drive
correctly. 3ware's 3DM™, a web-based storage management util-
ity, sends notification of drive failures via email and audible alerts,
providing the system administrator with local and remote asynchro-
nous event reporting of array activities. Some of the Escalade fea-
tures and benefits include:
• Non-blocking switch technology with RAID 5 parity
• On-board processor minimizes host CPU overhead
• SCSI device driver for O/S compatibility and easy installation
• Browser-based 3ware Disk Manager (3DM) utility with pass-
word security for network management of 3ware storage arrays
• SMTP support for email/pager notification of events
• Easy-to-configure arrays from BIOS
• BIOS supports booting from the array
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