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Cheapest SAN for testing
Hello all,
I need to come up with the cheapest possible SAN (or facsimile) for home-testing of some clustering technology. I've found some cheap older FC gear on Ebay, but the arrays are still a couple hundred bucks and even the bare-pc-board T-cards are $150 after you get all the parts and pieces together. I have a bunch of adaptec cards laying around (up to 29xx series) and SCSI drives, and I guess I was hoping someone knows of a cheap way to dual-port-attach them using some sort of adapter/converter that I just don't know about. Any info appreciated. Thanks, Stan |
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Stan wrote:
Hello all, I need to come up with the cheapest possible SAN (or facsimile) for home-testing of some clustering technology. I've found some cheap older FC gear on Ebay, but the arrays are still a couple hundred bucks and even the bare-pc-board T-cards are $150 after you get all the parts and pieces together. I have a bunch of adaptec cards laying around (up to 29xx series) and SCSI drives, and I guess I was hoping someone knows of a cheap way to dual-port-attach them using some sort of adapter/converter that I just don't know about. Any info appreciated. Thanks, Stan You can have multiple hosts on one SCSI bus, thats how a lot of clusters are built. Just need to make sure terminators are at the ends, and adapters have distinct SCSI IDs. No need for FC. -- Jason |
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In article , Jason Mather wrote:
You can have multiple hosts on one SCSI bus, thats how a lot of clusters are built. Just need to make sure terminators are at the ends, and adapters have distinct SCSI IDs. No need for FC. I just tried a setup like this, but concluded that it wasn't such a good idea after all. It seemed to be working fine when both nodes were up, but the problem was when the nodes were booted/power-cycled. That lead to a few scsi-resets, and some times hangs during scsi-card initialization. After searching some high-availability mailinglists, the consensus seemed to be that multi-homed scsi maybe wasn't such a good idea after all.. My setup was 2 Dell PowerEdge 2650, with Adaptec aic7899 SCSI controllers, and one dumb external SCSI disk. Now I've replaced the dumb SCSI-disk with a Nexsan ATABoy2 where we have two independent SCSI channels to the disk. That seems much more reliable, but the ATABoy2 is a bit expensive.. So, my question, are people really running simple setups with two hosts accessing the same disks on the same SCSI-bus, and if so, are there special settings that needs to be done on the SCSI controller? -jf |
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On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 19:23:33 +0200, Boyan Brezinsky
wrote: [ Snip ] One thing is certain - the Micronet SANCube is not actually suitable for a SAN, no matter what they claim. Unless they upgraded the technology inside in the meantime. Unlikely, on the grounds that Micronet is out of business... Boyan Malc. |
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You can have multiple hosts on one SCSI bus, thats how a lot of clusters
are built. Just need to make sure terminators are at the ends, and adapters have distinct SCSI IDs. No need for FC. -- Jason Thanks for the reply. As usual I left important details out of my post. I have to use Fibre channel, as the testing I'm doing requires (from a driver perspective) that the interface be either Qlogic or Emulex Fibre card. I've seen things like the RaidKing which will present a Fibre interface to a group of IDE drives, which looks like it would work, but I'm not sure how you slice off LUNs with such a device, but what I'm really looking for is a quick & dirty way of acheving the same thing, the Fibre equivalent of the aforementioned copper t-cards on Ebay. |
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