Expansion Chassis's for Dell R710

[Atomicslave]

Hi Guys,

I have a Dell R710 with a perc 6/i which i am not using.
I have a Norco 4220 with an asus board and 2x IBM 1015's in IT mode pusing 12x2tb disks in a raid 6 via mdadm.

I am trying to find best way to hook those drives right into the R710 mostly to save on power.

Converting the norco case to just a jbod case might work but costs start to run up with power boards and sas cable conversions. (the IBM1015's are internal SAS 8087 i would need to run them out of the dell and down to the Norco and you can get sas conversion ports for the back of the case but they arnt cheap and you end up spending alot on cables still).

I looked at the SGI3016s but they are getting old and I hear they can be pretty loud.

I am just wondering what other people are doing?

I am thinking either my options are to keep my SAN seperate from my vmware host and eat the power cost or sell off my norco and 1015s and buy something thats a better fit.

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[rubylaser]

A few questions:
1. What you are using for hardware inside the Norco case (CPU, amount of RAM, PSU, etc.)?
2. Are you spinning down the disks when your array is not in use?
3. Have you actually measured the idle power draw of this system?

 

[Atomicslave]

Its a dell P6T SE with 24gigs of corsair non ecc ram with a I7-930 (running vmware as an OS)right now but I have a Xeon L5630 i can toss in which is better on power.

I have about 6 vms running all the time so the raid is in use abit, I just switch my linux raid OS over to OMV (with both IBM 1015's passed through to that) not sure if its set to spin down at all. I might hop it over to solaris 11 soon anyways.

I have measured the draw but I don't remember the # I will have to do it again.