
Chapter 2. Terminology and concepts 15
2.1.2 SSA disks, disk adapters, and RAID controllers
The ESS can contain up to 384 disks in a variety of capacities. Currently there are 9, 18 and
36 GB disk drives available. Although the same disk technology and capacities are available
for SCSI, FC, FC-AL, ESCON and FICON attachment, ESS internally uses the Serial Storage
Architecture (SSA) protocol for performing disk I/O operations. The SSA disk adapters (DA)
provide almost all of the RAID functions within an ESS, such as parity calculations, disk
rebuild and sparing, and so on. This provides performance benefits by off loading function
from the central ...