Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 HW RAID Kit (530-8i for SD530)

Highlights

• MegaRAID FastPath SSD performance acceleration: MegaRAID FastPath software provides high-performance I/O acceleration for SSD-based virtual drives by using a low latency I/O path to increase the maximum I/O per second (IOPS) capability of the controller. This feature boosts the performance of applications with a highly random data storage access pattern, such as transactional databases.
• Auto-resume on array rebuild or array reconstruction after the loss of system power: Auto-resume uses non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to save the rebuild progress during a host reboot or power failure to automatically resume from the last checkpoint. Auto-resume ensures that data integrity is maintained throughout the process. The card supports a number of features that can be implemented without rebooting the server. Applications, such as email and web server, benefit from avoiding downtime during the 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 (RLM), which is also known as logical drive migration, can 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: Fast initialization quickly writes zeros to the first and last sectors of the virtual drive. This feature allows you to immediately start writing data to the virtual drive while the initialization is running in the background.
• 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 mirrors data when an inconsistent stripe is detected for RAID 1 and re-creates the parity from the peer disks for RAID 5 or RAID 6. Consistency checks can be scheduled to take place periodically.
• Extensive online configuration options and advanced monitoring and event notification: Management tools provide convenience for the configuration of logical volumes and alerting when errors have occurred or are about to occur.
• 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. You can define a physical disk as a hot spare to replace a failed drive. Hot spares can 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 allows the user to assign a hot spare drive to a particular array of the same drive type.
• Drive roaming: Drive roaming occurs when the physical disks are changed to different ports on the same controller. When the drives are placed on different channels, the controller detects the RAID configuration from the configuration data on the drives.
• XClarity Provisioning Manager for pre-boot array configuration and management: Provisioning Manager is the ThinkSystem UEFI-based application that includes a RAID setup wizard to help you configure drive groups and virtual disks before installing or booting the operating system.

Specifications