【Fujitsu】 GR800 Series of Disk Array Units

Fujitsu’s GR800 series of disk array units featured connectivity with a wide range of server systems, from mainframes to open servers. The first two models, the GR820 and the GR840, began shipping in November 2000. The larger unit, the GR840, had a maximum storage capacity of 4 terabytes when configured in a RAID-1 array.

To meet the demands of the open-computing era, Fujitsu offered the GR800 series as open-connectivity solutions that enabled the fast and seamless exchange of data between different kinds of servers (with different operating systems and different file systems). To ensure a wide range of server connectivity, the GR800 series provided BMC channel and optical channel link (OCLINK) interfaces for mainframes and fiber channel and SCSI interfaces for open servers.

The GR800 series provided two new functions — equivalent copy (EC) and one-point copy (OPC) — to beef up its advanced copy functionality that accelerated online backups of data between disks within a unit.

• EC begins making a redundant copy prior to the time slated for completing the copying process and, once the copy source and copy destination are equivalent, it isolates the copy destination disk to complete the copying process.
• OPC first completes the logical copying process immediately after the start copy instruction and then performs the physical copying process in the background.

The OPC function enabled the rapid copying or backup of data in use by services. It could also make multiple backups and manage backups by generation, and it greatly reduced recovery times when data were lost by a malfunction or other cause, since backed up data could be restored almost immediately.

Like the GR740 model, the GR800 series featured a remote advanced copy function that worked between multiple units as well as within a single unit. This made it possible to create disaster recovery systems where the backup system is situated in a remote location and connected to the main unit by a fiber-channel link.