Dell MD3200i Specifications download pdf (Page 7)

DELL PowerVault MD3200i/MD3220i Technical Guide Book

Controller Architecture

Figure 1. RAID controller architecture of the MD3200i controller.

The RAID controllers are the “engines” or the “brains” of the MD3200i and MD3220i storage arrays.

They perform the RAID calculations, control the I/O movement, communicate with the management

client, store the firmware, and protect data until it can be written safely to the hard disk drives. The

MD3200i’s architecture is designed to excel in multi-host systems environments. Its I/O system core

provides built-in hardware XOR for high-speed RAID parity calculations – enabling it to easily handle

very compute-intensive tasks. Each RAID controller contains 2GB of cache for a total of 4GB of cache

in a dual controller configuration which is mirrored with the other controller’s cache for high

availability. In the event of a power failure, the controllers are protected with battery assisted

persistent cache backup which destages cache to non-volatile media for indefinite safe keeping.

Each controller has a 36-port 6 Gb/s SAS expander that provides access to the drives in the MD3200i or

MD3220i enclosure. The SAS expanders enable each controller to access all of the drive ports creating

active/active drives loops that provide both controllers redundant access to all attached disk drives.

SAS

Exp

SBB

2.0 Compliant Connector

2GB

DDR-II

1Gb Eth

NIC

I2C

32-lane 8-port

PCI-E Switch

PCI-E

DDR-II

X24

(Drives)

(Alt Ctrl)

BBU

Cache Offload

Assembly

PCI-E

FPGA

Flash

16 Bit Parallel Bus

NVSRAM

PCI-E

(Alt Ctrl)

Flash

800MHz

Power PC

6Gb SAS

36 Port

Expander

iSCSI TOE

RJ45

RJ45 RJ45

RJ45

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Dell MD3200i Specifications Page 7

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