Title: Signature
I also have never heard of anyone plugging a drive direct into a
switch...it would usually be a storage array with a controller...in the
future it could be a server with a Fibre Channel Target as described by
Sumit. Today, you could use the Solaris iSCSI target to achieve some of
what you describe.
This paper gives a good introduction to Fibre Channel SANs:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/hub_articles/san_fundamentals.jsp
It has a counterpart discussing iSCSI/IP SANS:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/hub_articles/ip_san_fundamentals.jsp
I wrote them both a few years ago; technology and opinions have moved
on, but the fundamentals of how everything works have not changed SFAIK.
Sumit Gupta said the following :
On Jan 6, 2008, at 1:45 PM, D. wrote:
On Jan 6, 2008, at 10:45 AM, D. wrote:
Could I just plug a fibre-channel HBA into an x86
box,
then connect the HBA to a fibre-channel switch,
then plug drives into the switch's ports
and expect that to work?
Would I need extra software?
I assume when you say drive, you mean some storage
e box which can be
connected to a FC switch. Also I assume that by
'work' you mean that
the solaris 'x86 box' is able to see the drives (e.g.
through the
'format' command). And lastly I assume that you are
running latest
solaris (SDXE) release from opensolaris If so, then
yes, it will
work. Everything which is needed is already part of
standard solaris
distribution and no additional software is required.
By "drive" I meant one fibre-channel drive. That is,
I would like to plug one drive into each switch port!
I dont think you can connect a FC drive to a standard FC switch
because the port on the drive is different from the port on the
switch (unless by switch you mean an embedded backplane with a switch
chip). A more common approach is to use a FC JBOD (or any other form
of FC array) with a bunch of FC drives in it and connect that to the
FC switch. These JBODs normally do have multiple ports (2 is most
common) so that multiple paths can be created for each drive.
s still a path to the
drive through the other switch.
Later on, could I put the two x86 boxes with
HBAs behind another box and connect them with
either
fibre-channel (another HBA) or ethernet?
More software?
At that point could I plug a lot of workstations
into the last box?
A little more detail is needed here as I am not able
e to understand
what you are trying to do.
Sumit
Each x86 box would be a controller. There are two
for redundancy. So at this point, even if one switch
and one x86 box go down there is still a path to
each drive.
I think you are looking for target mode software on x86 box. The
software for that is not yet integrated into solaris. Check out the
opensolaris project COMSTAR (http://opensolaris.org/os/project/
comstar/).
But if ultimately you want to connect a large number of initiator to
these FC drives inside a JBOD, you dont need another controller. You
can simply connect all the initiators directly to the switch (or
cascade switches if the # of ports on the switch are running out).
Having a controller in the middle will help if you want to create
data services like create multiple smaller disks out of bigger disks
or implement raid volumes using zfs etc. But if thats not what you
are looking for then simply connecting all the initiators to the
switch is best.
Sumit
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