ATTO Technology diamond array vt 사용자 설명서

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Technical overview
ADXT Powers ATA to New Levels
The original notion of RAID was to build high 
capacity, reliable storage subsystems using large 
numbers of inexpensive disk drives. Thus its 
original definition: Redundant Array of 
Inexpensive Drives
. Over time that definition 
became Redundant Array of Independent Drives 
and the inherent cost advantage in a RAID system 
was lost. The Diamond Series provides a high 
capacity, high performance and highly reliable 
disk array that uses the merged power of many 
inexpensive ATA disk drives.
Intelligent Midplane 
The heart of the Diamond 
Series storage array is the intelligent midplane 
with ADXT
 
to sum or aggregate the data rates of 
individual ATA disk drives to create high data 
transfer rates. This technology enables features 
such as serverless backup, advanced error 
protection, metadata storage techniques, 
virtualization software, thermal management and 
advanced enclosure services. 
The midplane contains a combination of custom 
Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), 
processors and proprietary embedded software. It 
is divided into three main processing sections 
which handle the data being read or written to the 
ATA disk drives from the Fibre Channel or SCSI 
host interfaces. The Virtual Device Manager 
(VDM), Data Routing Fabric (DRF) and ATA 
Interface Engines (AIE) organize data streams for 
storage or retrieval. 
Virtual Drive Manager 
Data is accessed through 
Virtual Drives using an implementation of the 
standard SCSI protocol controlled by the Virtual 
Device Manager. The VDM adds capabilities 
such as RAID, data management services, 
enclosure management services, serverless 
backup, data replication using SCSI Extended 
Copy and LUN mapping. 
Data Routing Fabric 
Incoming or outgoing data is 
routed between the ATA Interface Engines (AIE) 
and the Fibre Channel or SCSI interface by the 
custom Data Routing Fabric ASIC, a high speed, 
low latency transfer fabric with more than 2 
GB/sec. of bandwidth supported by up to 512 
Megabytes of memory.
ATA Interface Engine (AIE) 
The interface to each 
pair of drives is through a custom ATA Interface 
Engine ASIC. The AIE implements the typically 
software-intensive ATA interface completely in 
silicon. Each AIE contains a dedicated ATA 
protocol processor to completely automate 
command and protocol processing. Automated 
command overlapping and queuing maximizes 
the performance of multi-threaded I/O. The AIE 
transfers data using double-clocking technology 
at 66 megabytes per second. The Diamond-VT 
contains 12 AIEs for a parallel transfer rate of 792 
megabytes per second. In 
addition to guaranteeing 
data transfer integrity with 
automatic CRC checking, 
the command and status 
transfers are validated 
using a patent pending 
technology unique to the 
AIE.
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DATA ROUTING FABRIC
VIRTUAL DEVICE MANAGER
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INTERFACE 1
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