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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">HI all,</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I know I have not made it to any meetings and only reply when I think I have relevant information so here are some ideas on the SAN.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">At my office I designed and built a Fibre SAN that we use on our Solaris boxes. It was built from scratch so we know every part in it and who made it. In my research there are many vendors but they all would not share the basic information with us about who made the controller, what FC card are they using, what disk drives, can I get any drive and use them... They like to sell the "System" so you are married to them from that point on.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Well I did not like the fact that if I purchased a 15 bay disk rack with say 5 drives populated I had to purchase the drives and canisters from the vendor to expand in the future. So I kept searching because all the vendors were charging way over market value for standard off the shelf disk drives (just for the hunk of sheet metal that holds the disk). I found a very good vendor that produces the actual metal drive enclosure and drive canisters. They will also sell you any controller from a list they represent: (CMD Titan Series, Viper Series; Digi-Data Fibre Sabre, 9500 Series, 9200 Series, 9100 Series, Fascore; Infortrend EON Series, Sentinel Series, IFT-3102 Series, IFT-3101 Series; Chaparral K7413 Fibre to SCSI, K5412 Ultra2 to Ultra2.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"> </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I have to say that the metal work and board work on these cabinets is first rate, they use three 300 watt power supplies, can do full SAFETY monitoring of temperature and other environmental conditions. We have purchased three boxes made by these guys two 18 bay and one 9 bay. Both have been very well made. Supposedly they built the RAIDs for Yahoo (a 9 bay Jaguar with DigiData controllers). </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Anyway we have about 1.4TB online on our two big racks and 144GB on the small rack. We have a mix of drives from 36GB to the 181GB disks making up the tiers/LUNS and have no problems. We chose the DigiData controller SCSI to the disk, Fibre to the host, Emulex LP8000 on the host adapter. You can make them as complicated as you want. LUN mask, mask by WWN or use a smart FC hub or switch (Gadzooks or Emulex). I think we have about $20K in our system so far but can replace disks at any time with any size etc for a long life expectancy.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">If you want to know more email me offline and I can go in to the specifics. If you are purchasing for a data center and want turn key then I would look into the Sun T3 or A1000 or EMC and Hitachi but be ready for the sticker shock. In those environments you are definitely purchasing a "system" but it all depends on your expectations and requirements.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Hope I helped,</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">John</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Links are <A HREF="http://www.adjile.com" TARGET="_blank">http://www.adjile.com</A> for the racks and <A HREF="http://www.digidata.com" TARGET="_blank">http://www.digidata.com</A> for our controller.</FONT>
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