Card Hardware Components

The Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card contains these hardware components:

Component	Description
Four SSD flash memory modules	Total of 400 GB 32nm eMLC NAND flash is directly mounted on the card in two stacks. Each flash module hosts an integrated multi-channel NAND flash controller.
PCI-E to SAS protocol controller	The card host controller has a PCI-E 2.0 x8 host interface connecting to a SAS/SATA x4 6 Gbit/sec protocol controller.
Energy storage components	Energy storage component capacitance allows time to shut down tasks cleanly, assuring full data retention during loss of power.

The Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card is a block storage device, with block sizing optimization capabilities. You can use the card for either nonpersistent or persistent data. The card offers high-performance with low latency and a low CPU burden. The Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card is designed with advanced enterprise multi-level cell NAND (eMLC) technology for high-level performance and write durability, while providing higher capacity than SLC NAND cards.

The Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card presents itself to the operating system through a Fusion-MPT™ interface as a flash card with four drives, that requires minimal user configuration. The card functions using a SAS controller with drive firmware running on its internal processor. The controller connects to up to four embedded flash memory modules.

For example, one Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card displays as follows in an Oracle Solaris operating system:

5. c0t500051610010E810d0 <ATA-3E128-TS2-550B00-T3EM cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 186> 
/scsi_vhci/disk@g500051610010e810
6. c0t500051610010EA9Cd0 <ATA-3E128-TS2-550B00-T3EM cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 186>
 /scsi_vhci/disk@g500051610010ea9c
7. c0t500051610010EC0Cd0 <ATA-3E128-TS2-550B00-T3EM cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 186>
 /scsi_vhci/disk@g500051610010ec0c
8. c0t500051610010EC60d0 <ATA-3E128-TS2-550B00-T3EM cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 186> 
 /scsi_vhci/disk@g500051610010ec60

The Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card uses a low-profile, half-height, and half-length PCIe board, as shown in the following illustration.

Figure 1 Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card Components