What is the difference between Storage processor and RAID controller?

Question

What is the difference between Storage processor and RAID controller in context of EMC CLARiiON SAN ? I went through many articles on internet but nothing cleared my confusion. As per wiki, A disk array controller is a device which manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It almost always implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. In a modern enterprise architecture disk array controllers (sometimes also called storage processors). Does that means Raid Controller and Storage processors are two terms for same thing? Can SAN has both Raid Controller and Storage processor at a time (if they are different) ?

kelleg · Answer

A Raid Controller is usually a stand-along PCI card that you add into a host (server) that you then connect disks to.

A Storage Processor on a EMC storage array is a different thing - it is a stand-along array controller containing the Storage Processors, the Disk Enclosures and the disks. The Storage Processor contains the raid controller for the disks that are attached to the controller.

glen

CLARiiON

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