Don> Apologies if this has been asked before. We have a DS14MK4 shelf Don> with 144G FC disks and 2 ESH4 modules that's no longer in Don> production. I've heard of people using these shelves as Don> direct-attached storage (no filer head, just directly cabled to a Don> host), but I haven't been able to pull up any details after Don> searching online. I figure if anybody has tried something this Don> silly, they're probably on this mailing list :)
Don> Has anybody been able to get this to work? Any tips/tricks?
I tried to do something like this about two years ago with a SunBlade 100 running Solaris 10, maybe 9, and using ZFS. Never got it to work reliably for whatever reason, and gave up. I was probably using a DS14mk2 though, so who knows.
As I recall, the biggest issue was the 520 byte sectors the Netapp drives come with, instead of the expected 512 byte sectors that most drives use natively. I seem to recall there was a trick you could use to make it work, but the hardware is gone so I can look it up.
Sorry, John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087