NAS soltuion for HP BL685c gen1

[Alexander Matev]

Hi,

I've been trying to find a good NAS solution for HP BL685c gen1, I've tried Nexenta, OmniOS ( napp-it ) and failed miserably, it appears that solaris 11 doesn't play nice with old hardware. Speaking of hardware, maybe it's a good idea to share what's on the BL685c gen1 blade, the CPUs are 4x Dual-Core AMD Opteron 8218, it has 32gb ram, infiniband mezzanine, 2xSAS 146gb drives.

So my question is : Is there an easy to use NAS solution that would run on that particular hardware and will give me the ability to use SCSI over RDMA ( SRP ), because I really want to dedicate this blade to be my NAS for my ESXi Lab ( I've got 3 more BL685c gen1s with the same parameters ). I am thinking of bare metal installation. I would consider however a virtual NAS if I could pass through the drives, the infiniband adapters and a usb stick, I can't tho ( the hardware doesn't support it as ESXi 5.1 informs me )

And to define easy to use - I mean that it should have some kind of user friendly web interface I really wanted to run napp-it, because it seemed like such a good fit for my needs, but alas ...

Thanks in advance. Any input is welcome

P.S The forum is awesome, sorry for being a bit hyperactive, but I just registered and I have so many questions

 

[Deci]

you want to make a nas that only has 2 drives?

you can get the sb40c to go beside it and replace the raid card with an LSI HBA card to give you 6 extra 2.5" bays or add two of them to give you 12 extra bays but this likely requires a pci pass through card that goes in the bl685c, this will require some new 8087 to 8087 50cm cables as well as the standard p400 uses the older style plugs.

otherwise maybe vsan? but you need to be on vsphere/vcentre 5.5 or 6 for that (1x ssd + 1x hdd per blade)

 

[cperalt1]

Napp-it for ZOL(ZFS on Linux) is available.

 

[k1mz3]

FreeNAS - It supports iscsi and it's very easy to use.

 

[Alexander Matev]

I've went with what Deci suggested. Still waiting on the pass through cards and the blade. When I've got it all I will post results Thanks for the feedback.

 

[Alexander Matev]

So I've got my HP sb40c blade, but to be honest I thought that all of the blades in the enclosure will be able to "see" it. So far I've been able to pair it with just one bl685c . So can somebody suggest a way to share it over the other 4 blades as well ? I need a nas solution that would work on bl685c gen1 . I've tried a bare metal install of nexenta ( failed ), as well as openindiana/omnios ( failed again ). I've got infiniband support as well, but I can't figure out a way to use SCSI over RDMA with the hardware I have and I know that there must be away to achieve that.
Any input is welcome.