HP XP7 Owner's Guide

2 Functional and operational characteristics
System architecture overview
This section briefly describes the architecture of the HP XP7 disk array.
Hardware architecture
The basic system architecture is shown in the following diagram.
Figure 5 HP XP7 architecture overview
The system consists of two main hardware assemblies:
• A controller chassis that contains the logic and processing components
• A drive chassis that contains the disk drives or solid state drives.
These assemblies are explained briefly in “Introduction” (page 6), and in detail in “System
components” (page 54).
RAID implementation overview
This section provides an overview of the implementation of RAID technology on the HP XP7 disk
array.
Array groups and RAID levels
The array group (also called parity group) is the basic unit of storage capacity for the HP XP7 disk
array. Each array group is attached to both boards of a DKA pair over 2 SAS paths, which enables
all data drives in the array group to be accessed simultaneously by a DKA pair. Each controller
rack has two drive chassis (factory designation DKU), and each drive chassis can have up to 128
physical data drives.
System architecture overview 17

HP XP7 Specifications

General

Brand	HP
Model	XP7
Category	Storage
Language	English