Why internal disks in Proliants are recognized as multiapth devices?

[Elko]

Hi all,

as title of this message says "Why internal disks in Proliants are recognized as multiapth devices?", I wonder is there any reasonable explanation know there are Smart array controllers inside Proliants and that is affecting that behaviour, but I would like to hear more from Smart array controllers point of view when it comes to accessing internal disks in Prolinat machines.Documentation explaining this would be excellent.

Thank you all in advance,

Kind regards,

[Matti_Kurkela]

Apparently, the internal Smart Array logical disk in a Proliant is not very different from a logical disk presented from a Smart Array Cluster Storage system, or a similar external Smart Array enclosure.

An external Smart Array enclosure may be multipathed, so it would make sense to recognize those as multipath devices.

If only one path to a disk is seen, it may not be possible to know whether it is a single-pathed internal disk, or an external disk with one or more paths in failed state at the moment.

At http://cciss.sourceforge.net there is a HW/FW documentation section. It contains some very technical documentation, but browsing through it might give you an idea of how Smart Array controllers handle disks in general.