Disk Shelf Storage System

The DS stands for ‘Disk Shelf’, naturally. The first digit is the size of the shelf in rack units. The DS224C, DS2246 and DS212C are two rack units, and the DS4246, DS4486 and DS460C are four rack units in size.

The next two digits in the model number are how many drives are supported per shelf. The DS212C fits 12 drives, the DS4486 can take 48 drives per shelf, the DS224C, DS2246 and DS4246 all take 24 drives per shelf, and the DS460C can take 60 drives.

The last digit tells us the bus speed of the IO Modules. Each shelf is fitted with two IO Modules for connectivity to controllers - one for each controller in an HA pair. The DS2246, DS4246 and DS4486 all run at 6GBps, the DS212C, DS224C and DS460C runs at 12GBps (the 'C' is 12 in hexadecimal).

Fig 1: A sample representation of a NetApp disk shelf; units we typically hold in stock at Tekmart Africa