RAID controllers

ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller for System x The ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller for IBM System x is an entry-level 6 Gbps SAS 2.0 PCI Express 2.0 RAID controller. The adapter has two internal mini-SAS connectors to drive up to 16 devices and supports the same base RAID 0, 1, and 10 feature set and drivers as the M5000 series controllers. With the attachment of the ServeRAID M1000 Advanced Feature Key, the ServeRAID M1015 offers the option of RAID 5 and SED Encryption Key management, while still being sensitive to administrator cost concerns in an entry-level RAID environment.

The ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller for IBM System x is an entry-level 6 Gbps SAS 2.0 PCI Express 2.0 RAID controller. The adapter has two internal mini-SAS connectors to drive up to 16 devices and supports the same base RAID 0, 1, and 10 feature set and drivers as the M5000 series controllers. With the attachment of the ServeRAID M1000 Advanced Feature Key, the ServeRAID M1015 offers the option of RAID 5 and SED Encryption Key management, while still being sensitive to administrator cost concerns in an entry-level RAID environment. This RAID controller provides connectivity to internal direct-attach or expander-attached hard disk, solid-state, or self-encrypting drives.

- The ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller has the following features:

Auto-resume on array rebuild or array reconstruction after loss of system power
Auto-resume uses non-volatile NVRAM to save rebuild progress during a host reboot or power failure to automatically resume from the last checkpoint. Auto-resume will ensure data integrity is maintained through the process. The card supports a number of features that are able to be implemented without rebooting the server. Applications such as email and web server benefit from avoiding downtime during transition.

Online Capacity Expansion
Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) allows the capacity of a virtual disk to be expanded by adding new physical disks or making use of unused space on existing disks, without requiring a reboot.

Online RAID Level Migration
Online RAID Level Migration (also known as logical drive migration) provides the ability to migrate a virtual disk from any RAID level to any other RAID level without requiring a reboot. System availability and application functionality remain unaffected.

Fast initialization for quick array setup

Consistency check for background data integrity
Consistency Check verifies that all stripes in a virtual disk with a redundant RAID level are consistent. The consistency check will mirror data when an inconsistent stripe is detected for a RAID 1 and recreating the parity from the peer disks when in the case of a RAID 5. Consistency checks can be scheduled to take place periodically.

Extensive online configuration options: advanced monitoring and event notification
Management tools provide convenience for configuration of logical volumes plus alerting when errors have occurred or are about to occur.

Patrol Read for media scanning and repairing
Patrol read is a background sentry service designed to proactively discover and correct media defects (bad sectors) that arise normally as a disk drive ages. The service issues a series of verify commands and if a bad block is discovered, the card's firmware will use RAID algorithms to recreate the missing data and remap the sector to a good sector. The task is interruptible based on controller activity and host operations. The firmware also provides an interface where the patrol read task can be initiated, set up for continuous operation, and terminated from a management application. Patrol read can be activated by manual command or automatically.

Global and dedicated Hot Spare with Revertible Hot Spare support:
A hot spare rebuilds data from all virtual disks within the disk group in which it is configured. ServeRAID provides the ability to define a physical disk as a hot spare to replace a failed drive. Hot spares may be configured as either global or dedicated. A global hot spare allows any physical drive to be designated as a hot spare. A dedicated hot spare will allow the user to assign a hot spare drive to a particular array of the same drive type.