I was cruising eBay and saw a few items that caused me to ponder upon a bit of an experiment and I wanted to get input from the forum.
The idea is to take an older raid storage array and modify it so that it is relatively up to date. I was originally looking at buying a Norco 24-Disk case and building out a storage server running two 12 disk raid 60 arrays. I was thinking that 24 2TB drives would give me about 40TB of usable storage running at 6GB.
The Norco case alone is @$400 and I have seen posts on the net about reliability issues. I also saw this post where someone took an older storage array and mod'd it.
Are You Looking For A Less Expensive Norco 4220 / 4224 Alternative?
My only issue with this mod is that it is still a 3GB system. So I was wondering if it might be possible to mod the backplane and replace it with (2) backplanes from a C6100 12 disk system. Since it supports 6GB and is a SATA disk in to SATA cable out. I have not checked if physically the backplane will work because I want to see if it would work electrically. Also would the SGPIO have to be connected? If so, it might drive me towards two 12 port raid cards rather that one 24 port card.
Also is the Dell SAS backplane (V3X78) both SAS and SATA? Looking at the owners manual for the C6100 I only found one backplane for the 12 3.5 disk system. There were a couple for the 24 2.5 disk systems.
Overall my idea is to drop in two dual port Infiniband cards into the storage array and directly connect then to my C6100 then PXE boot the (4) blades of my ESX server to drive all my VM's off the storage array, making it diskless. Currently I boot off of usb and run my VM's off of a slower 3GB JBOD server through an Infiniband switch. The switch limits me to 10GB but the cards in the C6100 are dual port 20GB so increasing the bandwidth in the storage server and between it and the C6100 is the goal.
The idea is to take an older raid storage array and modify it so that it is relatively up to date. I was originally looking at buying a Norco 24-Disk case and building out a storage server running two 12 disk raid 60 arrays. I was thinking that 24 2TB drives would give me about 40TB of usable storage running at 6GB.
The Norco case alone is @$400 and I have seen posts on the net about reliability issues. I also saw this post where someone took an older storage array and mod'd it.
Are You Looking For A Less Expensive Norco 4220 / 4224 Alternative?
My only issue with this mod is that it is still a 3GB system. So I was wondering if it might be possible to mod the backplane and replace it with (2) backplanes from a C6100 12 disk system. Since it supports 6GB and is a SATA disk in to SATA cable out. I have not checked if physically the backplane will work because I want to see if it would work electrically. Also would the SGPIO have to be connected? If so, it might drive me towards two 12 port raid cards rather that one 24 port card.
Also is the Dell SAS backplane (V3X78) both SAS and SATA? Looking at the owners manual for the C6100 I only found one backplane for the 12 3.5 disk system. There were a couple for the 24 2.5 disk systems.
Overall my idea is to drop in two dual port Infiniband cards into the storage array and directly connect then to my C6100 then PXE boot the (4) blades of my ESX server to drive all my VM's off the storage array, making it diskless. Currently I boot off of usb and run my VM's off of a slower 3GB JBOD server through an Infiniband switch. The switch limits me to 10GB but the cards in the C6100 are dual port 20GB so increasing the bandwidth in the storage server and between it and the C6100 is the goal.