SUMMARY Re: 3rd party FC disk systems with Solaris ?

[Christophe Dupre]

I know this is a really late summary, but better late than never.

Thanks to everyone for all the feedback, especially:
Juergen Waiblinger
Bertrand Hutin
Julie Peers

Consensus is that it should just work. The whole setup would not be
supported by Sun (obviously). I received a few notes of caution that some
Fibre HBA and switches are not compatible with each other. In my case, I
wanted to directly connect my server to the disk array, so it's not really
an issue.

So we went ahead and bought a Nexsan ATABoy2f. It has 960GB of usuable
disk space (after spare & RAID5 overhead), and has two 2gbps FCAL
controllers. I connected one to my E3500's HBA. I had to disable the auto
setting on the ATABoy for the speed and network number, but then it was
detected by the Sun and I was able to use it.

Right now I'm still testing it before moving my home directories to it.
I'm able to sustain about 25MB/s of transfer (according to iostat). The
load is made up of several tar transfering data from multiple sources over
gigabit network (so the disk is the bottleneck).

With a similar load, my previous array (Sun A3500) was only able to
sustain 15MB/s.

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Christophe Dupre wrote:

> Hi,
> we're in the process of upgrading our disk infrastructure. We've used 3rd
> party SCSI-LVD disk arrays in the past with no problem whatsoever. Now
> we're thinking of doing a little SAN (one array shared by two machines),
> but the Sun gear (T3 and such) is just too expensive.
>
> Is there anyone here with experience with 3rd party low-end fibre channel
> disk arrays with Suns ? We're thinking abou the NexSAN ATABoy
> specifically.
>
> Everything on Sun's site is about Sun's gear. The Traffic Manager etc all
> talk about only supporting Sun hardware.
>
> Can I expect to just plug my FC disk array and have it recognized at
> bootup with the default Solaris drivers ?


--
Christophe Dupre
System Administrator, Scientific Computation Research Center
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY        USA
Phone: (518) 276-2578  -  Fax: (518) 276-4886
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