Master Blake is indeed correct. I'm currently using FC8 and FC9 shelves for: 1) Testing iSCSI implementations on Linux 2) Testing ZFS on OpenSolaris (SPARC) 3) My home directory (UFS) on OpenSolaris (AMD)
I've got piles of old selves that we used on 760's and 840's. Literally, I've got 4 stacks of shelves that are 6' high. I use filer shelves for just about everything.
The only trick is that they are copper, so hold onto your HSSDC copper cables (HSSDC-to-DB9) and the DB9 interconnect cables. Also, pull the QLogic 2100C PCI FC-AL cards out of the heads and put them in just about any system you want.
In the case of my ZFS testing I've got 6 shelves pluged into a Brocade 2800 Silkworm Fabric Switch thanks to some cheap HSSDC GBIC's I bought on eBay, and then I use the FabricOS 'QuickLoop' feature to loop the shelves into both a JNI and a Sun SOC+ in my Sun Ultra2.
Frankly, old filer shelves are the best building blocks around for a variety of storage experiements and implementations. I love 'em.
The one catch is that I have as of yet been unsuccess at un-un-OnTap-izing them. That is to say, once you've blown away the disk headers and you put it back onto a Filer, OnTap won't touch the thing. I'm sure there is some diag command to reblast the disk but I'm not sure what it is, and frankly don't care. Also, the disks are of course really old, so the failure rate is pretty sizable, so if you don't have an endless supply of spares like I do, you might want to be careful about what you do with 'em.
NetApp gear kicks ass, whether its connected to a head or not. :)
benr.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Blake Golliher Sent: Fri 3/3/2006 11:17 PM To: Glenn Walker Cc: Charles Sprickman; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Using old FC shelves without filer
Ben wrote an article on this very thing!
http://www.cuddletech.com/articles/netapp/netapp-evms.html
I've been able to reuse some old R150 shelves with very little work on a FreeBSD box. It works great!
-Blake
On 3/3/06, Glenn Walker ggwalker@mindspring.com wrote:
They sound like FC8\FC9 shelves (the NetApp designated part). If I recall correctly, those old shelves were made for NetApp by a company called xyratex (www.xyratex.com) but I'm not sure you're going to find much about them.
Happy hunting.
As for the comm ports, those are not comm ports... they sound like the DB9\FCAL ports that you use to transfer data (using copper cables).
Old filer? You're talking about a 700 series or older, or maybe an 800 series if you can find one. Issues: in order to make it work, you need to license it - NetApp won't just give you licenses since you picked it up on resell and they'll charge a premium for supporting it. You're probably looking around $1500 on the low end for old stuff that doesn't have any new software versions coming out.
From the sound of it you may be better off building a linux machine with some of those new 1TB harddrives for the same money.
If money was no object, I'd suggest a FAS270... but $40k is probably out of your budget (like mine). :)
Glenn
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Charles Sprickman Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 9:07 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Using old FC shelves without filer
Hello all,
I recently had three NetApp shelves dumped in my lap (ouch!).
They were attached to a host with a (now borked) Mylex ExtremeRAID 3000.
I'm not having much luck finding any hardware RAID cards that compare to
the Mylex card and don't cost more than a few grand...
Anyhow, I may just get a simple FC card and do software RAID under FreeBSD using the new GEOM RAID tools. But before I go too far I'm trying to find some documentation on these shelves. They are FC/copper shelves. There
are labels on them that read:
Part Code - XL401R-FJ-02D Part Code - XL401R-FJC-02D Part Code - XL401R-FJF-02D Revision - A "Made in Ireland"
On the back each shelf has a rear panel flanked by two power supplies. The rear panel has three "cards": FC In/Out, Comm1/2 w/ temp/mute buttons, shelf id select with port a/b expansion switches.
Each shelf has 7 36GB drives.
Some digging reveals the company that made these for NetApp was bought by Adaptec a few years ago.
Where can I find some docs on the shelves themselves, specifically the two "COMM" ports? I tried hooking a terminal up to each, but no response after trying a variety of speeds.
Lastly, what kind of money would I be looking at to buy a used Filer? This would be primarily for hosting mail and web stuff. We're talking about up to 10,000 mailboxes (Maildir) and a few hundred low-volume websites. If I go used, I would ideally like to buy a spare filer, or a
bunch of spare parts for a filer if possible...
New is way out of the budget.
Thanks,
Charles