We are considering buying our first C6100. When I first looked at the box, it looked absolutely perfect for what we want to do.
The front of the box has 12 to 24 drive bays, the back of the box has 4 server nodes. We could potentially buy one of these and eliminate all of the equipment we are currently leasing and have the whole thing pay for itself in a couple of months.
What we would like to do is fill the 11 drive bays with 3TB drives, one with a SSD, and use a RAID controller that supports CacheCade to create one large raid 5 with caching on the SSD.
In doing research, I've discovered some issues
- the RAID card that normally comes with these won't even remotely come close to doing this
- I can't tell if there is a RAID card capable of this that also will fit in one of these nodes
- there is the serious issue that even if I find a card, the drives apparently power down if the node they are supposed to be connected to powers down.
- if all of that can be fixed, how do I get fast access to the raid from the other 3 nodes if there is a raid card plugged into the node that drives the raid.
Is it possible to configure this to work the way we want?