Recomendations for FC-attached storage appliance?
Charles Swiger
cswiger at mac.com
Wed Sep 21 12:22:07 PDT 2005
On Sep 21, 2005, at 2:12 PM, Danny Howard wrote:
> 1) Would anyone like to share a preferred storage solution? My
> dream is
> something where I can connect two FC controllers to two FreeBSD
> servers.
> If one controller fails, or if one server fails, I can still mount the
> same disks via the redundant server or controller.
>
> It sounds like most solutions have the disks on one controller or the
> other, so if a controller fails, the disks are inaccessible until you
> swap out the failed controller. The Apple Xserve RAID comes to mind.
>
The Xserve RAID does indeed have two separate controllers, each
attached to a separate 2GB SBF port, and thus is a single point of
failure. On the other hand, having a dedicated channel for each
drive rather than hooking them all into the FC mesh is a heck of a
lot less expensive than providing completely redundant controllers,
dual-loop connections for each storage device, etc, etc. You get
what you pay for.
If need be, have one set of 7 drives configured as a complete warm
backup for the second set of 7 drives, which you can do using higher
level software (like the ADIC StorEdge filesystem stuff Apple
recommends).
It may be the case that you'd be happier with a NAS solution from
Auspex, NetApp, etc, rather than trying to roll your own SAN...
> 2) Would anyone like to share a preferred HBA? I am constantly
> frustrated by suggested solutions because it seems that every disk
> appliance only ever supports one HBA. For example, the Apple ... only
> supports LSI7202XP. My research has found zero evidence that this is
> supported by FreeBSD. So, if that wont work, I should just run Linux?
> Or has someone stress-tested their favorite HBA and found it to be
> totally robust in some configuration ... ?
>
FreeBSD has driver support described in isp (Qlogic 2100, 2200, 2300)
and mpt (LSI FC909, 919, 929). I believe the LSI7202XP dual-port
PCIX card uses the FC929X controller chip, so FreeBSD ought to
support that HBA.
--
-Chuck
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