The Enclosure Services Interface (ESI) is a computer protocol used in SCSI enclosures. This is part of a chain of connections that allows a host computer to communicate with the enclosure to access its power, cooling, and other non-data characteristics. This overall approach is called SCSI attached enclosure services:
Contents
The host computer communicates with the disks in the enclosure via a Serial SCSI interface (which may be either FC-AL or SAS). One of the disk devices located in the enclosure is set up to allow SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) communication through a LUN. The disk-drive then communicates with the SES processor in the enclosure via ESI. The data sent over the ESI interface is simply the contents of a SCSI command and the response to that command.
In fault-tolerant enclosures, more than one disk-drive slot has ESI enabled to allow SES communications to continue even after the failure of any of the disk-drives.
ESI electrical interface
The ESI interface was designed to make use of the seven existing "SEL_n" address signals which are used at power-on time for establishing the address (ALPA) of a disk-drive. An extra eighth signal called "-PARALLEL ESI" is used to switch the function of the SEL_n signals.
ESI command sequence
A SCSI Send Diagnostic command or Receive Diagnostic Results command is sent from the host computer to the disk-drive to initiate an SES transfer. The Disk-drive then asserts "-PARALLEL ESI" to begin this sequence of ESI bus phases:
Finally, the disk-drive deasserts "-PARALLEL ESI".
The above sequence is just a simple implementation of a 4-bit wide parallel interface which is used to execute a SCSI transaction. If the CDB is for a Send Diagnostic command then the data is sent to a SCSI diagnostic page in the enclosure. If the CDB is for a SCSI Receive Diagnostic Results command then the data is received from a SCSI diagnostic page. No other CDB types are allowed.
Alternatives to ESI
There are two common alternatives ESI:
Specifications
The definition of the ESI protocols is owned by an ANSI committee and defined in their specifications ANSI SFF-8067 and ANSI SFF-8045.