【Hitachi】 A-6542 Disk Array Units

The A-6542 compact disk array subsystem, announced by Hitachi in June 2000, carried on the A-6541’s key functions while offering a higher order of performance, storage capacity, and reliability in order to work in large-scale cluster environments. With enhanced extensibility, such as SAN support, the A-6542 was capable of working with a huge gamut of systems from small-scale distributed processes to large-scale data warehouses.

Features of the units:

• （1）The A-6542’s controller offered up to six times the performance of the A-6541. And a fiber channel was used to connect controllers and hard disk drives (backend).
• （2）When installed in a dedicated rack, the A-6542 supported up to 100 hard drives for a total of 16.6 terabytes of storage in a RAID-5 configuration with 180 GB disk drives.
• （3）The A-6542 created replicas of logical volumes within the same subsystem without using the host (no routing). By using these replicas, it was possible to run online backups of databases in parallel with normal online operations without increasing the load on the server or LAN.
• （4）The disk array management program centralized management of array configuration settings, fault monitoring and alerts, and security settings.