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Cheapest SAN for testing



 
 
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  #1  
Old January 30th 04, 02:46 AM
Stan
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Default 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
  #2  
Old January 31st 04, 12:24 AM
Jason Mather
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Default

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

  #3  
Old January 31st 04, 02:39 PM
Jan-Frode Myklebust
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Default

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
  #5  
Old February 11th 04, 06:12 AM
Malcolm Weir
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Default

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.
  #6  
Old February 24th 04, 02:30 PM
Stan
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Default

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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