Dell PowerVault MD3200i Series Technical Manualbook - Page 7

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DELL PowerVault MD3200i/MD3220i Technical Guide Book

Controller Architecture

Figure 1.

RAID controller architecture of the MD3200i controller.

RJ45

32-lane 8-port

1Gb Eth

PCI-E

NIC

PCI-E Switch

2GB

DDR-II

Flash

BBU

FPGA

Cache Offload

Assembly

NVSRAM

SBB 2.0 Compliant Connector

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.

RJ45

iSCSI TOE

800MHz

Power PC

(Alt Ctrl)

SAS

Exp

6Gb SAS

36 Port

Expander

X24

(Drives)

(Alt Ctrl)