CPC5900

High-Performance IP Storage Blade

  • High-Density 6U x 2-Slot CompactPCI® Form Factor
  • 800 GB or 2 TB Capacity
  • Supports RAID 0/1/0+1/4/5/6
  • Board-Level & Disk-Level Hot-Swap
  • Headless Operation for Drive Removal and Insertion
     

The CPC5900 is a high-performance, high-availability NAS or SAN storage blade solution for PICMG® 2.16 systems. It supports either 800 GB or 2 TB of storage on each blade. The CPC5900 comes with two 3.5-in. enterprise-class SATA hard drives that support both board-level and drivelevel hot-swap for complete flexibility and high reliability.

The CPC5900 is designed for embedded storage applications. With its onboard, high-performance PowerPC® processor, the CPC5900 can also be used as an application server where disk-intensive services are required, thereby allowing payload blades in the platform to operate without a locally attached hard drive, which increases system reliability and capabilities. Network connectivity is provided by dual, redundant gigabit network ports connected to the PICMG 2.16 Ethernet port on the backplane.

This storage blade is available with Performance Technologies’ NexusWare® CGL Registered, POSIX-compliant Linux® operating system and development environment. Block Disk I/O is supported over iSCSI for SAN applications, and File I/O is supported by NFS and SAMBA for NAS applications.

With flexibility to configure the hard drives as needed inside the platform, the CPC5900 lowers the overhead and training costs associated with dedicated storage platforms and simplifies the networking interface and infrastructure configuration issues that stand-alone products can have.

Storage Capacity

The CPC5900 storage blade features two enterprise class 3.5-in. SATA hard drives. As storage manufacturers increase hard drive capacity, Performance Technologies will scale to accommodate these new drives. Currently, the CPC5900 includes two 400 GB or two 1 TB 3.5-in. enterprise class SATA hard drives. The hard drives can be configured as a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array, or as stand-alone drives. The CPC5900 provides up to 2 TB of storage when configured as a RAID 0 array. When used with a companion CPC5900, storage capacity increases to a maximum of 4 terabytes. RAID 0/1/0+ 1/4/5/6 configurations are also supported.

Design Elements

The CPC5900 performs at its best with Performance Technologies’ NexusWare 2.6 Linux kernel running from onboard Flash. General processing is performed by an AMCC PPC440GX 800 MHz PowerPC processor. The AMCC PPC440GX, 800 MHz PowerPC processor supports 512 MB ECC DDR memory, a PCI-X™ SATA controller, and dual gigabit Ethernet ports. The CPC5900 is managed locally by a serial port on the front panel or remotely by an SSH or telnet session.

The CPC5900 supports all the key services normally expected in a NAS or SAN storage server, including:


  • RAID 0/1/0+1/4/5/6
  • NFS/SAMBA
  • iSCSI Target/Initiator
  • PXE Server;
  • TFTP/FTP Server
  • Logical Volume Management
  • IPv6
  • SSH/Telnet
  • 9 KB packet sizes (jumbo frames)

As part of Performance Technologies’ Advanced Managed Platforms™, the CPC5900 supports PICMG 2.9 shelf management services common to all of Performance Technologies’ Advanced Managed Platforms products.

Headless Operation

While some storage solutions require console access to remove or add a hard drive, the CPC5900 afeatures “Automated Drive Management,” which allows safe extraction and replacement of drives without requiring a user to log into the system. Automated Drive Management works by deactivating drives prior to drive removal. An LED on the front panel indicates when the drive is ready for removal. Automated Drive Management automatically detects, configures, and remounts a newly inserted drive into the RAID array or file system. There are multiple LED indicators for each drive to communicate drive status to the user. The system is completely user configurable to customize the actions performed on drive extraction, insertion events, and the behavior of the LED indicators on the front panel.

Extensible

The CPC5900 is designed for extensibility and expandability:


  • Running NexusWare Linux from Flash allows for field configuration and upgrade without replacing hardware or modifying the hard drive.
  • 16 MB of expansion space is available in flash for additional services.
  • Separately ordered drive modules allow field drive replacements and upgrades.
  • Custom configuration services are available.
  • Adding another CPC5900 allows for a seamless doubling of storage capacity and additional RAID capabilities for a modest cost.

Cost Control

Connecting to external network attached storage can be expensive. It requires separate chassis, sparing, cabling, power delivery, training, and management tools. With the CPC5900, reliable, integrated storage can be easily added to any existing PICMG 2.16 architecture. Discrete hard drives in the system and external storage devices can be consolidated inside a single chassis. Sparing, hot-swapping, and configuration of infrastructure are simplified, and mean time to repair is reduced.

In short, the total cost of ownership for storage is reduced.

Specifications subject to change without notice. The names of actual companies, products, or services may be the trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective owners in the United States and other countries.