Universal Backplane Management (UBM)
Overview
The SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) standard for SAS and SATA backplane management over Serial GPIO was first introduced in 2003. This specification provided for LED control by the host, and allowed the host to detect the presence of bays and installed drives, as well as the bay numbering scheme. The specification provided activity and drive failure indication, and an appropriate controller could discern device type, bifurcation and speed automatically through the protocol. SGPIO has remained unchanged since 2006. Since that time, many innovations have increased the complexity of backplane management beyond the capability of SES and SGPIO. |
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Adoption of the UBM standard enables two key aspects of backplane management:
- Construction of a suite of fully interchangeable backplanes within a server, regardless of variations in the backplane interface to the host, or the media supported by the backplane. The use of UBM across the various storage architectures is highly desirable and avoids the complexity of manual configuration and the cost of misconfiguration.
- The ability to create a backplane that supports fully interchangeable storage media types within a drive bay, including changing between NVMe and SAS/SATA while a system is in operation.
UBM is defined in the SFF-TA-1005 industry standard and is sponsored by leading server and storage vendors.
Download our Universal Backplane Management whitepaper to learn how system integrators, server vendors, and end users benefit from UBM, how UBM works and how to implement UBM.
Adaptec SmartRAID 3100 , SmartHBA 2100, HBA 1100 SAS/SATA adapters, SmartRAID 3200, SmartHBA 2200, HBA 1200 Tri-Mode adapters, and Switchtec PFX/PSX/PAX Gen4 PCIe switches from Microchip support UBM, and previous SAS/SATA products are compatible with SmartRAID and SmartHBA adapters through legacy SGPIO support. Microchip provides UBM FRU/controller solutions through a single microcontroller with fully developed and integration-tested UBM firmware implementation.