[Cialug] Writeup soon - ZFS SAN build

[Matt Stanton]

I'd be interested in hearing how things go for you, so I'll keep an eye 
out for sure.  I blew my tax return on a 1000GB dell fibre channel SAN.  
It's *OLD*, but it talks at 1Gbps, which would give me read rates near 
100MB/sec.  In comparison, my SATA-2 hard drives (mixture of 5400 and 
7200rpm) only seem to be able to read at about 30MB/sec on a good day.

I've been working on this giant pile of metal for a week and a half with 
very little success, but I am getting pretty close to a breakthrough, I 
think.  Basically, the drivers to talk to the raid controllers in the 
PV660F will only run on windows server 2003 or earlier, and my desktop 
runs windows 7.  So, I came across a poweredge 1750 on ebay for $175 and 
jumped on it.  I figure I'll install the 'trial version' of windows 
server 2003 long enough to configure the raid controllers, then I should 
be able to attach it to anything that has up-to-date drivers for the 
fibre channel HBA.  After that, the poweredge can be convinced to run 
something sane, like ubuntu server.

Unfortunately, none of what I'm doing with this hardware is really 
linux-related.  I may decide to set the poweredge server up as a NAS 
frontend for the fibre channel array, in which case I'll be using linux, 
but if I can get that thing connected directly to my gaming pc via 
fiber, that's the way it's going to be.  I'll have a bunch of questions 
for the upcoming meeting. :)

On 2/16/2010 5:29 PM, Matt Breitbach wrote:
> So my boss ordered me parts to start on an OpenSolaris ZFS SAN box.  I'm
> going to be documenting my progress and the hurdles I've encountered.
>
> The primary plan is to share it via iSCSI, since that's what plays with
> Windows the best (I'd love to do NFS, but Win2k8R2 doesn't play so well with
> that mixed with Hyper-V from what I can understand).  Eventually we will be
> adding an Infiniband card and exporting it via iSCSI over Infiniband,
> possibly FC over Infiniband if I can get the encapsulation to work right and
> get proper driver support.
>
> Anyone want to have a hand in playing with the new toys?  So far I think
> I've got everything worked out, and my tests on older hardware have worked
> well, but there's always the possibility that OpenSolaris just won't boot
> from the disk, in which case I'll be good and stuck!
>
> FYI - parts that are on there way :
>
>
> http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=5440&lastcatid=53&step=4
> http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=3236&step=4
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139043
> http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=4518&step=4
> http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=6708&step=4
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117187
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835203002
>
> The plan is to load it up with two tiny SSD drives for boot :
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025
>
> Two cache drives :
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167017
>
> and two log drives :
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167013
>
> All cache drives, log drives and boot drives will be RAID1 mirrors.
>
> The rest of the chassis will be populated with 2TB SATA drives in a RAID10
> style configuration (via ZFS).  Hopefully there will be enough speed on the
> caching and logging drives to make up for the SATA drives on the backend.
>
> Anyway, parts should be in next week is my guess.  If anyone that's
> knowledgeable in OpenSolaris would like to help me poke at it drop me a
> line.
>
> Further down the line we plan on deploying additional systems as JBOD
> chassis behind this one, and possibly building something similar using all
> SSD drives instead of rotating media.
>
>
>
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