LSI JBOD's: Not Just Another Box

Written by John Martinez

LSI 620J JBOD: The LSI JBOD 620J is a 2U, 24 drive unit supporting 2.5” drives.

Storage is a key pain point for today’s businesses. Small, large or in between, it doesn’t matter. Businesses find themselves constantly stretched to their storage limit and they’re looking hard at how to solve this dilemma. LSI’s introduction of their new line up of JBODs goes a long way to help solve this problem that is both easy to implement and cost effective.

The JBODs come in two varieties. The LSI JBOD 620J is a 2U, 24 drive unit supporting 2.5” drives. The LSI JBOD 630J is a 2U, 12 drive unit supporting 3.5” drives. Both feature Enterprise class construction with design considerations for vibration isolation and thermal control offering a robust enclosure for a wide variety of applications.

The JBODs feature an Environmental Services Module (ESM) canister that offers LED support for unit identification, service required, and overheat within the enclosure. As part of the drive LED support the ESM will also show power, activity, fault, and drive removal, the fault indication being a key feature that lets you quickly discover which drive is bad so you don’t pull a good one by mistake. Included within each ESM canister is a 6G expander that allows multiple drives to share each SAS port to maximize connectivity and performance.

The JBODs feature both redundant power supplies and the option to install redundant ESM canisters. The redundant ESM canister is a key value add as they enable the ability to support failover configurations which is critical in high availability environments.

The LSI JBODs are designed to work with a wide variety of drive types including SAS, SATA, and SSD devices. With the included expanders they have built-in support for both 6Gb and 3Gb technology, so the type of drives that can be used in the each JBOD is limited only by form factor and the host interface being used (The compatibility for drive usage is dictated by the host system controller or adapter).

The LSI JBODs are easy to integrate into existing server environments, connecting to the system a couple of different ways. You can use a host bus adapter like the LSI 9200-16e or 9200-8e, giving you the ability to access the drives directly or you can use a SAS/SATA controller like the LSI MegaRAID 9280-8e which provides RAID functionality to use with the drives. Both types connect externally from the server to the JBOD using industry standard multi-lane SAS cables.

You can add additional JBOD units as needed to scale out capacity with the ability to cascade multiple units together using the LSI expander in the ESM canister. For example you can start with a single LSI JBOD 630J, populated with 2TB drives – that gives your customer 24TB of available storage. Later you may decide your customer needs additional storage, using the cascading function of the SAS expander you can then add an additional 630J to the first unit to scale out the capacity to a total of 48TB on the fly without the need to shut down the system. This ability to scale is limited only by the amount of devices supported by the host interface.

Using LSI’s JBOD technology as a key part of your customer’s storage backbone means scalability isn’t an issue. Adding more storage, larger drives, different drives, all of that is so much easier when you’re using LSI’s JBOD technology.