Lenovo ServeRAID M1215 SAS/SATA Controller

The ServeRAID M1215 SAS/SATA Controller is a part of the ServeRAID M Series family that offers a complete server storage solution consisting of RAID controllers, cache/flash modules, energy packs, and software feature upgrades in an ultra-flexible offerings structure. The M1215 offers a low-cost internal RAID 0/1/10 solution that can be upgraded to a cacheless RAID 5 with a Features on Demand (FoD) license upgrade. The M1215, shown in Figure 1, provides two internal mini-SAS HD connectors with eight lanes of 12 Gbps SAS and eight lanes of PCIe 3.0 to facilitate high data transfer rates.

• Global and dedicated Hot Spare with Revertible Hot Spare support: A hot spare rebuilds data from all virtual disks within the disk group in which it is configured. ServeRAID provides the ability to define a physical disk as a hot spare to replace a failed drive. Hot spares can be configured as either global or dedicated. A global hot spare allows any physical drive to be designated as a hot spare. A dedicated hot spare allows the user to assign a hot spare drive to a particular array of the same drive type.
• Patrol read for media scanning and repairing
• Management tools provide convenience for the configuration of logical volumes and alerting when errors have occurred or are about to occur.
• Extensive online configuration options and advanced monitoring and event notification
• Consistency check for background data integrity: Consistency check verifies that all stripes in a virtual disk with a redundant RAID level are consistent. The consistency check will mirror data when an inconsistent stripe is detected for a RAID 1 and will recreate the parity from the peer disks in the case of a RAID 5. Consistency checks can be scheduled to take place periodically.
• Fast initialization for quick array setup: Fast initialization quickly writes zeroes to the first and last sectors of the virtual drive. This feature allows you to immediately start writing data to the virtual drive while the initialization is running in the background.
• Online RAID Level Migration: Online RAID Level Migration (also known as logical drive migration) provides the ability to migrate a virtual disk from any RAID level to any other RAID level without requiring a reboot. System availability and application functionality remain unaffected.
• Online Capacity Expansion: Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) allows the capacity of a virtual disk to be expanded by adding new physical disks or making use of unused space on existing disks, without requiring a reboot.
• Auto-resume on array rebuild or array reconstruction after loss of system power: Auto-resume uses non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to save rebuild progress during a host reboot or power failure to automatically resume from the last checkpoint. Auto-resume ensures that data integrity is maintained through the process. The card supports a number of features that are able to be implemented without rebooting the server. Applications, such as email and web server, benefit from avoiding downtime during transition.