A storage system, or storage controller, is a device that coordinates and controls the operation of one or more disk drives and synchronizes the operation of the drives with the operation of the system as a whole.
Storage systems provide the storage that a SAN Volume Controller cluster detects as one or more managed disks (MDisks).
Supported RAID storage systems are detected by the cluster and displayed by the user interfaces. You can display and filter the MDisks that represent the cluster storage systems.
SAN Volume Controller supports both RAID and non-RAID storage systems. RAID storage systems provide redundancy at the disk level, which prevents a single physical disk failure from causing an MDisk, MDisk group or associated VDisk failure. To minimize data loss, only virtualize the following RAID storage systems: RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5.
A storage system can have a local name for the RAID or single disks that it is providing. However, cluster nodes cannot determine this name because the namespace is local to the storage system. The storage system can display the disks with a unique ID, storage system LUN or LU number. This ID, along with the storage system serial number, can be used to associate the MDisks in the cluster with the RAID that is presented by the storage system.