On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 17:59 -0800, David J. Orman wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking at Sun's 1U x64 server line, and at most they support two drives. > This is fine for the root OS install, but obviously not sufficient for many > users. > > Specifically, I am looking at the: http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x2200/ > X2200M2. > > It only has "Riser card assembly with two internal 64-bit, 8-lane, > low-profile, half length PCI-Express slots" for expansion. > > What I'm looking for is a SAS/SATA card that would allow me to add an > external SATA enclosure (or some such device) to add storage. The supported > list on the HCL is pretty slim, and I see no PCI-E stuff. A card that > supports SAS would be *ideal*, but I can settle for normal SATA too. > > So, anybody have any good suggestions for these two things: > > #1 - SAS/SATA PCI-E card that would work with the Sun X2200M2. > #2 - Rack-mountable external enclosure for SAS/SATA drives, supporting hot > swap of drives. > > Basically, I'm trying to get around using Sun's extremely expensive storage > solutions while waiting on them to release something reasonable now that ZFS > exists. > > Cheers, > David
Not to be picky, but the X2100 and X2200 series are NOT designed/targeted for disk serving (they don't even have redundant power supplies). They're compute-boxes. The X4100/X4200 are what you are looking for to get a flexible box more oriented towards disk i/o and expansion. That said (if you're set on an X2200 M2), you are probably better off getting a PCI-E SCSI controller, and then attaching it to an external SCSI->SATA JBOD. There are plenty of external JBODs out there which use Ultra320/Ultra160 as a host interface and SATA as a drive interface. Sun will sell you a supported SCSI controller with the X2200 M2 (the "Sun StorageTek PCI-E Dual Channel Ultra320 SCSI HBA"). SCSI is far better for a host attachment mechanism than eSATA if you plan on doing more than a couple of drives, which it sounds like you are. While the SCSI HBA is going to cost quite a bit more than an eSATA HBA, the external JBODs run about the same, and the total difference is going to be $300 or so across the whole setup (which will cost you $5000 or more fully populated). So the cost to use SCSI vs eSATA as the host- attach is a rounding error. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca14-102 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
