Compellent RAID card

[Diavuno]

So I picked up a dozen or so Supermicro 16 bay 3u chassis for about scrap value, Figured I'd find *A* use for them...

Turns out its a retired Compellent setup with all kinds of optical cards (Qlogic 1GB SFP) and a bunch of these:

Dell Compellent SC8000 PCI-E Raid Controller Card DV94N + 512MB Cache & Battery

Anyone know what good they are, or if they can be made useable?

(or can I just chunk these back together? I have what appears to be a head and 4 or 5 for drives) the rest are almost an identical config, but no branding.

 

[andrewbedia]

What an odd thing you have found @ that pcie card. I'm guessing FCoE or iSCSI. Hm. Strange.

Have a like for keeping things weird!

 

[Diavuno]

Funny thing about these cars, they ALL have the same orange plugs in the raid card.
They do however have 4-8 GB in fiber connections and the 3 GBe onboard (on being IPMI)
Unfortunately the boards are ALL x7

Each node also has Zero disks, and zero cables to the backplane.

 

[Lost-Benji]

Never seem them before but a little research would tell me that these are RAID HBA's for FCoE. Very limited uses hence why so cheap.

 

[TuxDude]

I don't think those are RAID cards at all. We have them in our Compellent SC8000 nodes, and I'm 95% certain that they are the cache-card in each node. Compellent is software RAID and does not use hardware RAID cards, so no need for that functionality. I don't know what the RJ45 ports on the card are for, but I highly suspect it is not for any kind of ethernet.

As cheap as they are on ebay I'm almost tempted to buy one just to plug it into something running a standard OS and see what I can make it do.

 

[Lost-Benji]

I don't think those are RAID cards at all. We have them in our Compellent SC8000 nodes, and I'm 95% certain that they are the cache-card in each node. Compellent is software RAID and does not use hardware RAID cards, so no need for that functionality. I don't know what the RJ45 ports on the card are for, but I highly suspect it is not for any kind of ethernet.

As cheap as they are on ebay I'm almost tempted to buy one just to plug it into something running a standard OS and see what I can make it do.

FCoE = Fibre Channel over Ethernet

 

[TuxDude]

FCoE = Fibre Channel over Ethernet

I'm aware of what FCoE is - we are running a bunch of it here. But this card is NOT an FCoE card - it is not a RAID card or HBA of any type. The Compellent-OS uses it as a cache-card, but I'm not really sure what it would show up as under a regular OS.

 

[Diavuno]

I'm going to install Server 2012 or perhaps 2016 on one of them and see what happens

 

[Diavuno]

Looks like it is some sort of ethernet adaptor.

it's the only thing without drivers in this photo:
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AND I popped the heatsink the chip is not marked....