| Ultra-Wideband Recording Stretches to Keep Up With Digitizers |
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| Nov 01 2007 | |
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advertisement: Fibre Channel (FC) hard disks are enterprise-class drives with 1.2 million hour MTBFs. A single disk drive delivers 80 MB/sec of performance all the way to the inner tracks. They again take advantage of the lightweight, long distance cabling FC offers, and using the FC arbitrated loop, over 100 drives can be attached to a single FC port. Disks are dual ported, and both ports can be used simultaneously. This means real-time recording tasks can use one set of ports, and analysis functions can be carried out with a workstation operating on the second ports. In addition, RAID configurations are possible. Besides the dual porting and multiple drive per port capability mentioned, queues of disk groups can be established to boost performance and allow uninterrupted recording and analysis on a larger scale. Many recorders can share a single disk group, or a single recorder can be routed to multiple disk groups. The configuration possibilities are only limited by physical space and cost considerations, but FC can scale from the smallest 73GB drive to the largest of configurations measured in petabytes. Putting It All Together With these four items in place, an ultra-wideband streaming recorder can be constructed as shown in the opening illustration. Clearly seen are architectural elements of the fast digitizer with its outputs striped to serial FPDP ports, multiple high speed recorder engines connected to an array of storage, a Fibre Channel switch connecting all the data to an array of analysis workstations, and a single SBC that provides timing and control of the entire system. |
