Disk arrays

A wikipedia:disk array is a disk storage system which contains multiple disk drives (HDD or SDD). It is differentiated from a disk enclosure by providing additional functionalities and capabilities such as fault tolerant designs, cache memory, different RAID levels, deduplication, encryption and even virtualization.

Primary vendors of storage systems include Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle Corporation.

Some disk arrays such as NetApp allows to group disks creating pools of HDD, SDD or mixed.

Activities

1. Identify available vendors offering disk array solutions and their OS such as Netapp ONTAP
2. Identify main advantages of using a disk array solution vs using computer internal disks or a internal array controller
3. Identify main characteristics of disk arrays fault tolerant designs
4. Identity hot plugging capabilities of disk arrays
5. Understand different connectivity technologies such as Fibre Channel, NFS or iSCSI availables on disk arrays products.

See also

• ONTAP NetApp’s proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays
• HDD and SDD
• RAM
• IOPs and block size
• Fibre Channel and Storage Area Networks (SAN)
• HPE ProLiant Smart Array Controllers
• CompTIA A+ certification: Computer Support/Hardware/Storage
• Filesystems: ZFS
• Backup