SAS RAID card/HBA with Solaris Express Support

[smccloud]

I am looking at replacing my HP N40L with a HP ML310e Gen8 (I know I could build a better server myself but it has everything I want and the Wife Acceptance Factor is fairly high). However, I want to run Solaris Express + napp-it on it (but I could use NAS4Free if I have to). What is a decent but still inexpensive (again WAF) SAS card that is supported by Solaris Express with a minimum of 2 ports (prefer 1 SFF-8087 & 1 SF-8088 but two SFF-8087 + an adapter would work) as I not not a huge fan of HP's RAID cards. Just need to be able to pass SMART info through to the OS. I am planning on ZFS RAID 10 (4 existing 1TB HDDs, 2 existing 750GB HDDs & 2 new 2TB HDDs). I was thinking the HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 SGL but I'm not sure of its Solaris/BSD support.

 

[gea]

I am looking at replacing my HP N40L with a HP ML310e Gen8 (I know I could build a better server myself but it has everything I want and the Wife Acceptance Factor is fairly high). However, I want to run Solaris Express + napp-it on it (but I could use NAS4Free if I have to). What is a decent but still inexpensive (again WAF) SAS card that is supported by Solaris Express with a minimum of 2 ports (prefer 1 SFF-8087 & 1 SF-8088 but two SFF-8087 + an adapter would work) as I not not a huge fan of HP's RAID cards. Just need to be able to pass SMART info through to the OS. I am planning on ZFS RAID 10 (4 existing 1TB HDDs, 2 existing 750GB HDDs & 2 new 2TB HDDs). I was thinking the HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 SGL but I'm not sure of its Solaris/BSD support.

Best of all for ZFS are LSI HBA Controller like LSI 9207, LSI 9211 or IBM 1015 (similar 9211, but half the price).
The last two must be reflashed to IT firmware.

Why are you looking at Solaris Express?
This is obsolet since a year. Successor is Solaris 11.1.

You may also look at OmniOS + napp-it, a free Solaris fork with the newest ZFS bits of all free ZFS distributions.

 

[smccloud]

Did they update OmniOS with the latest ZFS? Last I looked it was a few versions behind. And I meant Solaris 11.1 even though I typed Solaris Express.

 

[gea]

Did they update OmniOS with the latest ZFS? Last I looked it was a few versions behind. And I meant Solaris 11.1 even though I typed Solaris Express.

Since Oracle Solaris is closed source we now have two different and incompatible development lines

- ZFS > V.28 = Oracle Solaris only, you will probably never get it for free but with special options like ZFS encryption
developped by Oracle and used by Oracle only

- ZFS V28/5000 (OpenSource Solaris fork) but with special feature flags like LZ4 compress
developped by Illumos and used in OI/OmniOS/NexentaStor/SmartOS (free Solaris forks) but also in BSD and ZFS on Linux.
The newest free ZFS bits for storage use are in OmniOS