The controller contains the BrickStor SP Operating System (BrickStorOS) and provides a centralized management point for your storage deployment and services. Controllers are sometimes referred to as heads, or nodes.

A typical controller is equipped with multi-core Intel CPUs and 256GB or more memory. The system uses this memory for caching, which is discussed in greater detail later in this documentation. Controllers provide networking via onboard interfaces with a typical system containing two 10GbE Ethernet interfaces onboard, and two or more 10GbE or faster Ethernet interfaces as add-on components for data access. Controllers also provide component redundancy wherever possible, including power, cooling, and storage used by the operating system, etc.

A BrickStor SP disk enclosure is an appliance with redundant components which, like a controller, is engineered to be fault-tolerant. An enclosure is sometimes referred to as a shelf. Enclosures are either fully or partially populated with mechanical and/or solid-state drives. These drives act as the primary storage for your BrickStor Security Platform and are organized into logical groupings called Pools. Enclosures can also contain special cache and write optimized journal devices.

Enclosures are attached to controller(s) via dual SAS host controllers, and utilize SAS drives, which permit multi-pathing throughout the system. Multi-pathing adds to system redundancy and IO load distribution. Loss of path to storage may cause a pause, while the system recovers from the loss and continues operating with a single remaining path. Whenever possible, RackTop recommends using multi-pathing throughout your deployment.

Enclosures are populated with high capacity storage drives. Typical configurations include mechanical Hard Disk Drives, Solid State Drives, or a combination of the two (Hybrid).

In some instances, special purpose drives used for caching or journaling are installed in the controller. These are often referred to as Write Cache or Read Cache.

Both types of drives use SAS interfaces, which possess dual-ported capability and enables multi-pathing as described in Enclosures. Enterprise grade drives are a standard feature in all systems and are selected to fit a specific configuration both in terms of capacity and parity scheme or mirroring.

There are high availability options available in addition to the basic standard configuration. High availability is a configuration which includes two controllers and one or more disk enclosures with shared access between these controllers. The basic premise is high availability to some degree protects from catastrophic physical failure, or failure in operating system on a controller. Because storage is common between the controllers, high availability configuration is not meant to provide increased protection for storage, instead storage is protected through mirroring or a parity scheme such as RAID.

The default appliance user name is root and the password is “racktop”. This password is well known and should be changed immediately.