Dear group:
I'm a tech-hobbiest and have been learning this and that about linux for the past few months. In the process I've built a sort of heterogeneous system that's getting to about 24 units worth of rack space (and a hefty electric bill). One of the components of this cabinet is a Norco DS1220 disk pack. For those unfamiliar, it's a 3U enclosure containing 12 hotswap SATAII drive trays, and uses Port Multiplier to a Sii3124 PCI-X card that I have mounted in one of my Fedora host servers. The system I am describing seems a bit limiting because now my Fedora host, which I'm running as a Samba file server, is the only way to access files. I've been reading here and there about SANs and LUNs and iSCSI and all that expensive stuff, to not really know what I am talking about at all, but nonetheless have been wondering if I can hack some hardware in a way that will allow me to convert my Norco DS1220 into something like a SAN. My thought (this is where maybe some experts in this area might correct or maybe steer my in the right direction) is that the DS1220 might be capable of being converted into a reasonably inexpensive SAN. I cracked the hood on the enclosure, and it looks like there might be enough room in the case to mount a mini-itx motherboard. If so, then would it be possible to run something like OpenFiler on it? I think the m-itx boards lately have pci-express risers. I think I could plug all those sata drives into some type of raid controller, but then after that I am at a loss how I'd connect my fancy-dancy hacked SAN to the rest of my system. I do have a cool Netgear GSM7224 that has fiber ports on it, but I am not sure if I would need other hardware to make it work. Is this a crazy idea, thoughts on how to approach this, or should I keep what I got going for me? Thanks! Todd Worden Web-Wired, LLC 434.906.0420 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.web-wired.com <http://www.web-wired.com/>
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