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9176/D173 DISK SUBSYSTEM - SITE PREPARATION GUIDE 1
S
IXTH EDITION
About the Site Preparation Guide
This document provides information about ordering and site requirements for installation
of the StorageTek
™ 9176 and D173 Disk Subsystems.
Introduction
The 9176 and D173 come in a 19 inch rackmount cabinet, already configured for the
host(s). The 9176 always has at least one 9176 controller tray and one 9170 drive tray.
Officially the controller is called the StorageTek 9176 Disk (or ENTPR Disk) Controller
and the drive tray is called the 9170 Disk Array, however, throughout the 9176’s set of
technical documentation, these devices may simply be referred to as a controller tray or
drive tray.
The D173 Disk Subsystem is an entry level disk subsystem, which has two 2772 controller
circuit boards installed into a drive tray. This combination is now called a D173 Disk
Controller Array. One or two 9170 Disk Array “extensions” may be added for a maximum
total of 30 drives (available in 72GB or 180GB drive module sizes). The D173 also uses
the 7.10 level of Object Manager, which enables customers to activate the heterogeneous
storage environment capabilities. Simply put, this allows one to network their storage with
a variety of different kinds of operating systems, for example Solaris, Windows NT,
Windows 2000, HP-UX, AIX, SGI, LINUX, and Netware.
When ordering Disk Subsystems it is important to be aware of performance vs. capacity.
Customers may strive for low cost—buying based on cost per MB; or they may purchase a
higher numbers of spindles and smaller drive sizes for higher performance. Or, they may
select factors (such as cache) to improve performance, but yet keep costs down. Also
bandwidth is primarily a factor of the number of controllers and paths from the host to the
backend storage. Please be aware of all of these issues when helping customers, so that we
place the best possible solution into the customer’s business environment.
Various types of hardware and software components can be ordered depending on your
business needs. The following section provides some information to facilitate your
decision making, and help you select the right hardware (and software components) for
your computing environment.
To fully understand this guide and all other technical documents, it is recommended that
system operators and service technicians have extensive knowledge of Fibre Channel and
network technology.