* On 02 Feb 2010, Orvar Korvar wrote: > Ok, I see that the chassi contains a mother board. So never mind that > question. > > Another q: Is it possible to have large chassi with lots of drives, > and the opensolaris in another chassi, how do you connect them both?
The J4500 and most other storage products being discussed are not servers: they are SATA concentrators with SAS uplinks. You plug in a bunch of cheap SATA disk, and you connect the chassis to a server with SAS. The logic board on the storage tray just converts the SAS signalling to SATA. It is not a computer in the usual sense. In many cases such products also have SAS expander ports, so that you can link multiple storage trays to a single SAS host bus adapter on your server by daisy-chaining them. So you need at least one SAS HBA on your OpenSolaris box, and SAS cables to hook up the trays containing the SATA drives. To the original question: you can purchase a J4x00 with a limited number of drives (empty is generally not an option), but there is no officially-sanctioned way to obtain the drive adapters except to buy Sun disks. You need either a SAS or a SATA drive bracket to adapt the drive to the J4x00 backplane, but they are not sold separately: one ships with each drive. As mentioned there are companies that sell remanufactured or discarded components, or machine their own substitutes. (Re)marketing Sun or compatible drive brackets has always been a lively business for a few small outfits. But Sun has no involvement with this, and may be unwilling to support a frankenstein server. Sun state that their OEM drives are of higher quality than OTS drives from manufacturers or retailers, and that they have custom firmware that improves their performance and reliability in Sun storage trays/arrays. I see no reason to disbelieve that, but it is quite a steep price to pay for that premium edge. When cost is a bigger concern than performance or reliability, I have generally bought the StorEdge product with the smallest drives I can (250 GB or 500 GB) and upgraded them myself to the size I really want. It's cheaper to buy 20 drives from CDW than 10 from Sun even when you account for the tiny throwaway drive, and you can keep the 10 extra as cold spares. At low enough scale the financial savings are worth the time to replace them as they fail. (I wish I could say the same of the StorEdge arrays themselves. Fully half of my 2540 controllers have failed, costing me huge amounts of time in both direct and contractual service, and I'm given up on them completely as a product line. I'll be thrilled to switch to JBOD.) For larger and less fault-tolerant systems, when money is available, I'm happy to pay Sun's premium. However, as others say, the other brands sometimes offer decent enough products to use instead of Sun's enterprise line. As always, it depends on your site's requirements and budget. I assume that a home NAS is comparatively low on both: therefore I wouldn't even shop with Sun unless you have a line on cheap castoffs from an enterprise shop. -- -D. d...@uchicago.edu NSIT University of Chicago _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
