SATA RAID Enclosure That Exposes Fibre or iSCSI?

I have been a long time fan of the Compaq RA4100 RAID enclosure. They
cost next to nothing, and they do a full RAID 1+0 on up to 14 SCSI 15K
hotswap drives. To make things even nicer, they work with off the shelf
SCSI 80 pin drives that are almost any manufacturer and model. A common
use for these for us has been on application servers. We put in two fibre
channel cards, and direct attach each of these to a separate RA4100 array.
You can then use Windows mirroring (or upgrade to Veritas Storage Foundation
and get snapshot capability), and you have a fully redundant, active-active
configuration that is extremely cheap, robust, and resists any single point
of failure.

I have been looking for something similar that is based on SATA drives. and
I'm coming up short. HP has the MSA1500 and MSA1510, but these are more
of a shared storage system and there are cases where I want something that
is a bit more integrated into one box. I've tried to stay away from
having lots of systems share storage on a larger array system because a
mistake by an opertor on such a system ends up costing you more. The
lower-end MSA systems I know about have been SCSI only.

Does any vendor make a SATA based product like what I am describing that has
a very low price point and will work with off-the-shelf SATA drives? The
all-in-one SATA array enclosures I have seen either implement a full NAS
(and this I do NOT want), or do fibre channel or iSCSI exposed logical
volumes at a very high price point, which more than offsets the savings by
going from SCSI to SATA drives.

--
Will

Will wrote:

Does any vendor make a SATA based product like what I am describing that has
a very low price point and will work with off-the-shelf SATA drives? The
all-in-one SATA array enclosures I have seen either implement a full NAS
(and this I do NOT want), or do fibre channel or iSCSI exposed logical
volumes at a very high price point, which more than offsets the savings by
going from SCSI to SATA drives.

How about the Promise V-Trak M-Class kit?

http://www.promise.com/

Failing that, you can roll your own iSCSI target using Linux and a
suitable enclosure, like the Supermicro SC836 or SC932.

ESB

In article ,
am says...

I have been a long time fan of the Compaq RA4100 RAID enclosure. They
cost next to nothing, and they do a full RAID 1+0 on up to 14 SCSI 15K
hotswap drives. To make things even nicer, they work with off the shelf
SCSI 80 pin drives that are almost any manufacturer and model. A common
use for these for us has been on application servers. We put in two fibre
channel cards, and direct attach each of these to a separate RA4100 array.
You can then use Windows mirroring (or upgrade to Veritas Storage Foundation
and get snapshot capability), and you have a fully redundant, active-active
configuration that is extremely cheap, robust, and resists any single point
of failure.

I have been looking for something similar that is based on SATA drives. and
I'm coming up short. HP has the MSA1500 and MSA1510, but these are more
of a shared storage system and there are cases where I want something that
is a bit more integrated into one box. I've tried to stay away from
having lots of systems share storage on a larger array system because a
mistake by an opertor on such a system ends up costing you more. The
lower-end MSA systems I know about have been SCSI only.

Does any vendor make a SATA based product like what I am describing that has
a very low price point and will work with off-the-shelf SATA drives? The
all-in-one SATA array enclosures I have seen either implement a full NAS
(and this I do NOT want), or do fibre channel or iSCSI exposed logical
volumes at a very high price point, which more than offsets the savings by
going from SCSI to SATA drives.


we've got some 48 bay SBOD (SATA bunch of disks) boxes w/
Fibre Channel to the host and some appliances that can either
deliver NAS or iSCSI, depending on the software we add to them


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"Andy" wrote in message
news:sT_Ig.14521$lv.5587@fed1read12...
we've got some 48 bay SBOD (SATA bunch of disks) boxes w/
Fibre Channel to the host and some appliances that can either
deliver NAS or iSCSI, depending on the software we add to them

So to put numbers on this: a SCSI to fibre RA4100 costs these days under
$200. The interface is 1 Gbit, but that's overkill for many applications.

I'm looking for a SAS/SATA to fibre box that is under $1K. The products
on your site looked well above that. If I were going to spend that kind
of money, no doubt I would go with Apple XSERVE RAID, which is the way a lot
of companies seem to be going.

Probably the technology is just too new to have commoditized to the level I
want at this point.

--
Will