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jedigeorge
Weaksauce
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2010
- Messages
- 78
I just had a cast-off rack full of SAN stuff become available. A DS4700, a half dozen EXP810s with a mixture of drives, an x3550 server, and two SVC nodes (model 2145-CG8). This is....er... was...way better gear than I'm used to using. I normally use iSCSI and NFS from ZFS over gigabit ethernet.
Now, this is all FC stuff, and I don't have the budget to add anything FC but an HBA, so I'm figuring I will just direct attach the DS4700 (and by extension the EXP810s) to the x3550, and present a bunch of disk as iSCSI and NFS over gigabit copper. Not as good as an FC SAN, but I don't have a budget for this, just the donated hardware. Also a half-dozen old, but decent, 48 port gigabit switches, so I can separate out the iSCSI traffic. It'll match my ghetto ROCKS cluster pretty well.
What I'm wondering about is if the SVC appliance boxes are worth using as intended, or if they can be hacked into behaving like 1U servers. They certainly look a lot like the other x3550, just with that appliance thing stuck to the front and connected by a USB cable. I could always use more cluster nodes. Unless I could find a FC switch and upwards of 16 HBAs for something like... $300. Ha.
Now, this is all FC stuff, and I don't have the budget to add anything FC but an HBA, so I'm figuring I will just direct attach the DS4700 (and by extension the EXP810s) to the x3550, and present a bunch of disk as iSCSI and NFS over gigabit copper. Not as good as an FC SAN, but I don't have a budget for this, just the donated hardware. Also a half-dozen old, but decent, 48 port gigabit switches, so I can separate out the iSCSI traffic. It'll match my ghetto ROCKS cluster pretty well.
What I'm wondering about is if the SVC appliance boxes are worth using as intended, or if they can be hacked into behaving like 1U servers. They certainly look a lot like the other x3550, just with that appliance thing stuck to the front and connected by a USB cable. I could always use more cluster nodes. Unless I could find a FC switch and upwards of 16 HBAs for something like... $300. Ha.
