Evertz' Storage Controllers and Storage Expansion chassis provide scalable, RAID-protected storage to Evertz' clustered SuperNAS™ system. Various storage technologies and RAID types may be combined in the SuperNAS™ storage sub-system to provide multiple performance, storage capacity and data redundancy capabilities thereby allowing a single SuperNAS™ system that meets multiple price/performance goals.
Evertz' 30R16 Storage Controller (SC) and Storage Expansion (SE) are 3RU chassis composed of sixteen (16) 3.5" Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). The Storage Controller contains dual-redundant, hot-swappable, hardware RAID Controllers that provide RAID protection across the internal sixteen-drive array. Multiple Storage Expansion chassis may be attached to each Storage Controller using dual-redundant SAS expansion ports. RAID protection is thereby extended to each attached Expansion Chassis.
Data stored in a Storage Controller or Expansion chassis is RAID6 protected, so that each sixteen-drive array could lose two drives and still provide access to the data. For very high read/write bandwidth applications, such as live events, sports or post production, RAID0 or RAID 10 striping across multiple Storage Controllers is available by the Evertz FileSystem. RAID0 striping can provide very high write bandwidth and RAID10 for a combination of very high write bandwidth with data mirroring.
To achieve a fault-resilient, High-Availability (HA) SuperNAS™ system, each Storage Controller contains dual HW RAID Controllers. Furthermore, each HW RAID Controller has two or more 8Gbps Fiber Channel (FC) ports. These are connected to a pair of redundant 8Gbps FC switches which in turn are connected to each Media Server node in the SuperNAS™ cluster. The dual HW RAID Controllers, combined with the dual-redundant FC network paths and switches support ‘active-active' multi-pathing by the Media Server nodes. This not only provides each Media Server node with two FC paths to each Storage Controller, but enables data to travel across both paths for all reads and writes. Active-active multi-pathing assures that there are no latent double-faults that could take data off-line as are inherent in active-passive arrangements. Increasing the fault-resilience of each Storage Controller even further, the dual-redundant RAID Controllers provide active-active backup thus assuring that even if a single RAID controller should fail, the redundant RAID Controller could access the drives in both the Storage Controller chassis and in all attached Storage Expansion chassis.
Storage Controllers, and their SAS-attached Storage Expansion chassis, can support multiple HDD types within a single SuperNAS™ system. Some SCs, and their SEs, can be composed of 15k or 10k RPM HDDs for high read/write performance and others can be composed of less-expensive 7.2k RPM HDDs for high storage capacity. This allows multiple storage tiers within a single SuperNAS™ system. As an example, a high-performance storage tier composed of 15k or 10k RPM HDDs for on-air record and play, can be supplemented with a high capacity storage tier composed of 7.2k RPM HDDs as a near-line archive.
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