[olug] SAN Information

Fri Sep 27 16:09:47 UTC 2002

HI all,
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.

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.

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.

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).  

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.

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.

Hope I helped,
John

Links are http://www.adjile.com for the racks and http://www.digidata.com
for our controller.

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