[geeks] SAN opinions

[Scott Howard]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 01:33:23PM -0500, Francois Dion wrote:
> Sun Storedge 3510FC or whatever the OEM is. If you have any discount

Yup, they are nice little arrays.  There's also the 3511FC which is
basically the same thing, but instead of being FC-AL drives it's SATA.
A good deal cheaper, but I woulnd't even think of using it in anything
near critical due to the unreliability of SATA drives.
Both are FC-AL to the host.

> battery pack. Very space efficient. If you need more spindles/space,
> you can go to 9 expansion cabinets (2U each) for a total of >100
> drives. But 5 units seems to be the proper limit due to performance.

You can go to 8 expansion units, plus the RAID unit. ie, a total of 9x12
disks.

> More than likely, you dont even need fiber switches as there are 8
> ports on the unit.

True, but keep in mind that there's only 4 FC-AL buses available for hosts,
with 2 ports on each bus.  ie, the only way to go above 4 hosts (or 2 with
multipathing) is to put multiple hosts on the one bus.  They do LUN masking
so it's not like the hosts can see each others disks, but it's still not
ideal...

  Scott.