Raid system with fibre channel arbitrated loop

摘要

A modular and highly available RAID system has a fiber channel arbitrated loop (FC-AL) interface coupled with a disk array. Fault-tolerant operation is assured. The system provides dual and isolated arbitrated host and storage device loop circuits for redundant, independent input/output (I/O) paths to local and/or remote host computers. Each loop includes bypass circuits which prevent the failure of any device (host computer or storage device) from affecting the operation of loop. Orthogonal data striping may be used to further assure data integrity.