【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.
Specifications of the A-6542 disk array unit
Enclosure type Rack-mount models Floor models
Basic
enclosure
Expansion
enclosure
Rack 10-disk
version
20-disk
version
Model name A-6542
-RK
A-6542
-RKA
One RK and
nine RKAs
A-6542
-CK1
A-6542
-CK2
Host interface 1 Gbps / 2 Gbps fiber channel, Ultra-2 SCSI, Ultra SCSI
Disk drives 17.8 GB / 35.6 GB / 71.6 GB / 175.8 GB disk drives
Subsystem capacity 35.5 — 1582.9GB 16180GB
max.
35.5 — 1582.9GB 35.5 — 3165.9GB
Cache size 256 ー 2,048 MB/controller
External dimensions [mm]
(w x d x h)
483x656
x262
483x656
x152
610x813
x1880
262x737
x600
417x737
x600

A-6542-RKA-6542-RKAA-6542-CK1