AM311A HPE Integrity Smart Array P411/256 SAS Controller

AM311A is the HP Smart Array P411/256 controller for HP Integrity servers: a PCIe x8 SAS controller with two external x4 mini SAS connectors, rated up to 6 Gb/s for SAS and 3 Gb/s for SATA. The board comes with a 256 MB cache module (the array accelerator) and a connector for an optional cache battery that turns the cache into battery-backed write cache. Fit it in an x8 or larger PCIe slot. The controller board spare is 462918-001 and the 256 MB battery-backed cache module is 462974-001.

On HP-UX the controller needs HP-UX 11i v3 B.11.31.1003 or later and the RAID-01 (ciss) driver bundle B.11.31.1005 or later; Windows is also covered. It has two modes. RAID mode provides hardware RAID 1, 1+0 and 5 and is required on Windows; HBA mode presents raw disks for more usable capacity, for enclosure-managed redundancy or for volume-manager RAID. Tape devices work in both modes. SATA disks are not supported in HBA mode, and the first release with adapter firmware 3.30 does not support SATA at all. Disk and tape devices go on separate SAS connectors.

HP-UX online addition and replacement is not supported on this card, so it is installed with the server powered off. Afterwards swlist reports the RAID-01 bundle and ioscan -kfnd ciss reports the controller. The saupdate.efi utility in the UEFI shell checks attached enclosures, updates controller firmware, sets HBA or RAID mode and can be used to make the P411 the boot controller. RAID-01 B.11.31.1005 also adds firmware downloads to D2600 and D2700 series enclosures attached to it.

The HP Integrity rx2800 i4 is the Integrity server that takes AM311A.