Users Guide

Table Of Contents
Physical disk power management
Physical disk power management is a power-saving feature of PERC 11 series cards. The feature allows disks to be spun
down based on disk configuration and I/O activity. The feature is supported on all rotating SAS and SATA disks, and includes
unconfigured and hot-spare disks. The physical disk power management feature is disabled by default. You can enable the
feature in the Dell Open Manage Storage Management application or in the Human Interface Infrastructure (HII) configuration
utility. For more information on HII configuration and physical disk power management, see Enabling physical disk power
management. For more information on using the Dell Open Manage Storage Management application, see the Dell OpenManage
documentation at www.dell.com/openmanagemanuals.
Profile Management
PERC 11 supports the PD240 profile. It defines controller queue depth and the maximum number of physical and virtual disks.
Table 3. Supported profile on PERC 11
Feature PD240
Profile ID 30
Maximum virtual disk supported 240
Controller queue depth 5120
Secure firmware update
This feature provides a cryptographic method of updating the firmware using an RSA encryption-decryption algorithm.
Only Dell-certified firmware is supported on your PERC controller.
Snapdump
The Snapdump feature provides the Dell support team with the debug information which can help to find the cause of firmware
failure. In the instance of firmware failures, the firmware collects the logs and information at the time of failure, which are
stored in a compressed file called a snapdump.
Snapdumps are also generated manually to provide additional debug information. When a snapdump is generated, it is stored in
the controller's cache memory. This means in the event of a power loss the controller will offload the snapdump as part of its
cache preservation mechanism. Snapdumps are preserved by default through four reboots before its deleted.
To generate a snapdump, change the snapdump, delete a snapdump, and to download a stored snapdump settings, see Dell
EMC PowerEdge RAID Controller CLI Reference Guide at www.dell.com/storagecontrollermanuals.
Virtual disk features
This section lists the following virtual disk features supported on PERC 11 cards in detail:
Virtual disk write cache policy
Virtual disk read cache policy
Virtual disk migration
Virtual disk initialization
Reconfiguration of virtual disk
Background operations
Virtual disk write cache policy
The write cache policy of a virtual disk determines how the controller handles writes to the virtual disk.
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Features of PowerEdge RAID Controller 11