I am going to use the LSI 9280-4i4E with the CSE-836E26-R1200B chassis. The BPN-SAS2-EL2 backplane in the chassis has two expanders, as I understand it. Does this mean with two RAID controllers, I can have full redundancy if one controller fails?
The chassis does provide dual paths for redundancy (failover) alright. The concern is on the hard drive and the SAS controller.
The circuit board in the SAS drive offers two interfaces for two expanders in the backplane. The SATA drive doesn’t have the capability, unless an interposer is used.
As for SAS controller, the LSI 9280-4i4E is the MegaRAID (MR) controller, and it doesn’t support the failover. The problem is that the firmware cannot share the same set of drives between multiple MR controllers. Also it doesn’t have mechanism to synchronize controller cache between MR adapters. A new MR product that will support failover is under development. However, it is not ready at this moment. Right now the only option is to use a regular SAS controller such as 1068E or 2008 with IT or IR firmware, and run MPIO on OS level.
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