IBM #EL1S EXP24S SFF Gen2-bay Drawer for 8247

Feature #EL1S is the EXP24S SFF Gen2-bay Drawer, the expansion drawer for high-density storage on IBM Power Systems S812L and S822L servers, machine type 8247. It supports up to 24 hot-swap 2.5-inch SFF SAS HDDs on POWER6, POWER6+, POWER7, POWER7+ or POWER8 servers in 2U of 19-inch rack space, with redundant AC power supplies and two power cords. The drives are Gen2 (SFF-2) drives, which physically do not fit the SFF-3 bays of the S822L system unit. For a new order of the drawer #EL1S is the feature that is configured, while an existing #5887 drawer is also supported.

Three mode settings are set by manufacturing: one, two or four sets of disk bays. With Linux the drawer can be ordered with four sets of six bays (mode 4), two sets of 12 bays (mode 2) or one set of 24 bays (mode 1), and there is no option to reset the mode after shipment. Six SAS connectors on the rear carry the labels T1, T2 and T3, two of each; mode 1 uses two or four of them and modes 2 and 4 use two T2 and two T3. A drawer in mode 4 can attach to two or four SAS controllers.

One #EL1S drawer in mode 1 can attach to the two SAS ports at the rear of the Power S812L or S822L through two SAS YO cables (#ECBT, #ECBU, #ECBV or #ECBW). Those rear ports come with the expanded-function storage backplane with dual IOA support (#EL3U), and SSDs and HDDs cannot be mixed in the drawer when it is attached to them. The PCIe2 LP RAID SAS Adapter Dual-Port 6 Gb (#EL2K, CCIN 57C4) and the PCIe3 LP RAID SAS Adapter (#EL3B, CCIN 57B4) are the internal adapters that support the drawer. Up to 14 EXP24S drawers can be attached to these servers, and the 1.2 TB 10K RPM SAS drive in a Gen-2 carrier (#ESD3) is among the drive options.