IBM SAS Connectivity Cars At-A-Glance Manual page 8

Table 6. Components used when connecting the SAS Connectivity Card (CIOv) to the integrated
BladeCenter S storage with support for shared storage
Diagram Part number / Machine
reference type
Varies
43W4068
8886
43W3584
43W3581
Take these considerations into account when planning BladeCenter S advanced shared storage
implementations:
Every blade requiring integrated storage connectivity must have one SAS Connectivity Card installed.
At least one DSM must be installed into the BladeCenter S chassis; a maximum of two DSMs are
supported in one chassis. The IBM BladeCenter S does not ship with any DSMs as standard.
Two SAS RAID Controller Modules must be installed into the BladeCenter S chassis.
The SAS RAID Controller Module creates storage pools (or arrays), and the RAID level is defined for
these storage pools. Logical volumes are created from storage pools. Volumes can be assigned to
specific blades, or be shared by several blade servers.
Zoning is supported by the SAS RAID controller module. However, zoning should not be used for
regular operations (that is, for purposes other than troubleshooting).
The RAID functionality is supplied by the SAS RAID Controller Modules installed into the BladeCenter
S chassis.
RAID levels supported: 0, 1, 5, 10.
Maximum volume size is 2 TB.
Maximum number of volumes is eight per blade server (for a total of 48 volumes per chassis).
One volume can be mapped to all six blades in the chassis.
Mixing HDDs of different capacities in a single volume is supported. However, the total volume size is
aligned with the size of the smallest HDD, and excess space on larger-sized HDDs is not used.
Both SAS and Near-line SAS (NL SAS) hot swap HDDs are supported, and intermixing SAS/NL SAS
drives is supported as well. However, each storage pool must have hard disks of the same type, that
is, SAS or NL SAS. SATA drives are not supported by the SAS RAID Controller Module.
Global hot-spare drives are supported. The drive designated as a hot-spare should be as large as or
larger than other drives in the system.
Blade boot from logical volume is supported.
Path failover is supported with IBM Subsystem Device Driver Device Specific Module (SDD DSM) for
Windows and Device Mapper Multipath (DMM) for Red Hat/Novell SUSE Linux.
Currently, external storage attachments are not supported.
SAS Connectivity Card (CIOv) for IBM BladeCenter
Description
BladeCenter HS22 or other supported server
SAS Connectivity Card (CIOv) for IBM BladeCenter
BladeCenter S
IBM BladeCenter S SAS RAID Controller Module
IBM BladeCenter S 6-Disk Storage Module (DSM)
Quantity
1 to 6
1 per
server
1
2 required
1 or 2
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