http://www.natecarlson.com/2010/05/07/review-supermicros-sc847a-4u-chassis-with-36-drive-bays/
Review: SuperMicro’s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays May 7, 2010 · 9 comments in Geek Stuff, Linux, Storage, Virtualization, Work Stuff SuperMicro SC847 Thumbnail [Or "my quest for the ultimate home-brew storage array."] At my day job, we use a variety of storage solutions based on the type of data we’re hosting. Over the last year, we have started to deploy SuperMicro-based hardware with OpenSolaris and ZFS for storage of some classes of data. The systems we have built previously have not had any strict performance requirements, and were built with SuperMicro’s SC846E2 chassis, which supports 24 total SAS/SATA drives, with an integrated port multiplier in the backplane to support multipath to SAS drives. We’re building out a new system that we hope to be able to promote to tier-1 for some “less critical data”, so we wanted better drive density and more performance. We landed on the relatively new SuperMicro SC847 chassis, which supports 36 total 3.5″ drives (24 front and 12 rear) in a 4U enclosure. While researching this product, I didn’t find many reviews and detailed pictures of the chassis, so figured I’d take some pictures while building the system and post them for the benefit of anyone else interested in such a solution. In the systems we’ve built so far, we’ve only deployed SATA drives since OpenSolaris can still get us decent performance with SSD for read and write cache. This means that in the 4U cases we’ve used with integrated port multipliers, we have only used one of the two SFF-8087 connectors on the backplane; this works fine, but limits the total throughput of all drives in the system to 4 3gbit/s channels (on this chassis, 6 drives would be on each 3gbit channel.) On our most recent build, we built it with the intention of using it both for “nearline”-class storage, and as a test platform to see if we can get the performance we need to store VM images. As part of this decision, we decided to go with a backplane that supports full throughput to each drive. [...] _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
