Can someone explain to me how EMC2/Netapp FC arrays operate?

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cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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I bought 4 15k600s and they are FC; my fault, didn't read the product code. Can you just buy one of the 15bay FC arrays off eBate and connected it to a FC card or do they need they require the right controller?

I may just eat the loss and sell them if I cant come up with a way to use them easily.

TIA
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Well at least you can put the cabinet up to 30m away with copper cable, 10km with fibre.

FC has only one interface so should be easily hooked up, that is on paper, in real life its bound to be harder :)
FC controllers are just fancy LAN controllers up to 4Gbps
The 4gbps controllers are not cheap though, you'll be wanting a nice LSI7204EP 4GB Dual Port Fibre Channel HBA

Key Features of Fibre Channel Hard Drives

Hot-plugging capability – Fibre Channel hard drives can be installed or removed while the host system is operational. This can be crucial in high-end and heavy-use server systems where there is little or no downtime.
ANSI standard compliance for serial port interface – Fibre Channel hard drives do not require special expensive adapters.
Speed – In its intended environment, Fibre Channel is the fastest option available.
Cost effectiveness – Compard to other high-end solutions, Fibre Channel is inexpensive because it does not require special adapters.
Loop resiliency – Fibre channel provides high data integrity in multiple-drive systems, including Fibre Channel RAID (Redundant Array of Independent (Inexpensive) Disks)
Longer cable lengths – Compared to LVD, Fibre Channel can maintain data integrity through significantly longer cables. This makes configuring multiple devices easier.
Click to expand...
 
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cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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The long distance could be nice, I am guess these 15ks are loud.

I was looking at HBAs on ebate. I dont think that LSI is on the VMware HCL, but there were some ~$250US ones that were. I guess my question is more about the arrays and not about FC. From what reading I have done, it seems if I were to get one of these arrays, put drives into it and hook it do my computer I would have access to 4 separate drives. Please correct me if I am wrong with this. If that is the case it isnt really useful for ESXi, I would want some RAID, but I could use it for my desktop or file server with Windows RAID/ZFS.

I am hesitant because it seems FC is a dying standard for HDD interconnect and I would have to put in ~$500US just for infrastructure. That would more than double what I have in already for ~1.8TB raw disk space. Seems like I will be selling them.
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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I would put it down to experience and start again.

FC is all fine and dandy when you are running a heap of drives (up to 126 per port)
But for ease of use, SAS/SATA is probably the way to go, and more likely to be supported in ESXi

I had 8x 15k drives in a 5u server, there is a definite noise coming from the drives
But the fans in the server drowned it all out :)
 
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