Mass Storage Subsystems for CHALLENGETM, POWER CHALLENGETMand ONYXTM MP Systems
Table of Contents
Mass Storage Subsystems for CHALLENGE (tm), POWER CHALLENGE (tm) and ONYX (tm) MP Systems
The high performance of the CHALLENGE, POWER CHALLENGE and ONYX multiple processor systems makes them a natural choice for a wide range of data-intensive applications. Silicon Graphics complements its computing and graphics technologies with a range of mass storage products, emphasizing high-performance, growth, and reliability.
The POWERchannel-2 card provides a dedicate I/O Bus (HIO-Bus) at 320MB/sec (sustained) from the system's 1.2GB/sec backplane. All I/O is driven by the HIO-Bus. There can be up to four independent HIO-Buses per system for a maximum hardware connectivity of over 1GB/sec. Each POWERchannel-2 supports up to 8 SCSI channels (through HIO SCSI cards), for a system maximum of 32 SCSI channels.
All SCSI channels are SCSI-2 fast/wide differential (20MB/sec interface). In addition, Silicon Graphics introduces a system that utilizes a version of the UNIX R operating system, the first of its class to use SCSI-2 fast/wide disks for maximum disk performance. With a system maximum of greater than 3 terabytes capacity and up to 1.2GB/sec sustained throughput, these systems extend the reach of UNIX systems into mainframe and supercomputer territory, all at UNIX server pricing.
After you have purchase this high performance hardware, how do you utilize the power for your own use? Until now, UNIX systems required a use to "Go RAW," that is to go around the UNIX file system to achieve high-performance. This meant cumbersome hard-coding of tile manipulation instructions into every application. Many people did not wish to undertake this burden, so they continued to use the UNIX file system and sacrifice performance. With Direct I/O (standard in IRIX tm 5.X), users can directly access disks from their applications using normal UNIX file system commands. For large records, such as images, user will see up to 80% of the maximum possible hardware performance.
Increased performance from multiple disk drives comes through parallel access to N disks to read/write a single file. This is called N-way striping. IRIX 5.X allows N-way striping to all attached disks over as many SCSI channels as are available. With N-way striping, maximum sustained throughput of up to 450MB/sec can be realized.
The CHALLENGE, POWER CHALLENGE and ONYX MP Mass Storage Subsystem can grow with your user demands. Starting at 2GB, the system can be expanded in increments as small as 2GB up to a maximum of +3TB.
All 2.0GB disks are field-upgradable to RAID. By adding a RAID upgrade kit, you can add the performance and reliability that a RAID subsystem provides.
At 750,000 hours - the best in the industry - the life span of the 2GD drive can be as much as three times that of 5.25" full height SCSI drives. 3.5" design means smaller motors and less heat reaching the sensitive Printed Circuit Assembly (PCA), where the majority of failures occur in disk drives.
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) allows for the failure of a disk drive without losing any data. Silicon Graphics SCSI RAID provides the protection of RAID at the low price of SCSI disks. Silicon Graphics provides SCSI-2fast/wide RAID in 8GB-15MB/sec increments. And with our SCSI RAID Hot Plug feature, you can replace a drive without taking your disk farm off-line.
Many UNIX systems require additional hardware to mirror disks. As the number of disks increases, the amount of hardware that you must purchase to mirror increases. Silicon Graphics does mirroring in software (IRISVolume Manager tm) so that you pay one price to mirror the disks you have today and tomorrow.
------------------------------------------------
Formatted Capacity 2013.7MB
Number of disks 8
Number of heads 16
Recording surfaces 15
Tracks per surface 2870
Tracks density (TPI) 3168
Areal density (MB/In**2) 259
Recording Density (BPI) 81913
Byte per sector Variable
Disk Type Thin Film
Channel PRFD
Actuator Type Rotary VCM
Head Type Magneto resistive (MR)
------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
Media date rate 5.22MB/sec
Transfer rate (sustained) 4.0MB/sec (est**)
Access times Average read 9.2 ms
Average Write 10.7 ms
Track-to-track read 0.6 ms
Full Stroke 17.4 ms
Rotational Speed 5400 rpm
Command Overhead (read) random 280 ms
Sequential with read ahead 410 ms
Interface data transfer rates
Synchronous 20MB/sec
Asynchronous 10MB/sec
Buffer size 512K
-------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------
Height 41.3mm
Width 101.6mm
Length (w/out connector) 153.2 mm
Weight 0.8 kg
----------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
MTBF (hours) 750,000 hrs
Recoverable read errors < 10 in 1011
Non-Recoverable read < 10 in 1015
errors
Seek errors < 10 in 108
Predictive failure analysis Yes
Buffer memory parity Yes
Longitudinal redundancy Yes
code
Preventative maintenance None
--------------------------------------------
-----------------------
+5 VDC Idle 1.10A
+5 VDC Standby 0.87A
+12 VDC Idle 0.60A
+12 VDC Start-up 2.7A
Power 12.7W
-----------------------
--------------------------------------------
Feature Operating Non-Operating
--------------------------------------------
Temperature 5 - 55C 1 - 65C
Relative humidity
Non-condensing 8 - 90% 5 - 95 %
Altitude -1K - 10K" -1K -40K"
Shock (11 ms) 10G 60G
Vibrartion 1G 2G
--------------------------------------------