I am sort-of a part-time hardware hacker/developer, so please bear with me here :) Here is what I am heading for: -> (2) Adaptec Raid 5805 SAS HBA (PCI-Express x 8) 8-sas-port Internal contoller cards. http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/Controllers/Hardware/sas/performance/SAS-5805/ -> (16) 1-Terabyte SeagateES.2 SAS drives http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/barracuda_es/barracuda_es.2/ -> (1) Supermicro 16 drive server case (836TQ or 936 ?) http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/
-> Motherboard, argh, well heres the breaker decision for me: -I'm not certain about the Motherboard yet although it will have to have atleast 2 x8 PCI-express slots, and it will probably have to be AMD/Opteron CPU's since OpenSolaris/ZFS has excellent support apparently for those true-64-bit CPU's. Example Configuration # 1: It will mostly be used as a "DAS" unit, Disk-Storage-Server, and with the above capacity I am simply concerned primarily about raw "PERFORMANCE" only. For example, I might want to just stripe 8 disks across each of the above adaptec controllers, and then use (a ZFS) filesystem to mirror them for redundancy. The performance is required since I will running this system and experimenting with lets say for example oracle, or mysql, database server, playing around with ZFS,....? ok well I'm lookin' at around $2200 to starters, (the case, a few SAS drives, and (2) adaptec controllers). I already have my own ASUS M2N-E, which I'll use for now. My other concern which I'm hoping someone here might help me with is: 1./ the Adaptec 5805 sas HBA, according to Adaptec, they do have Solaros/x86 drivers' but I don't know if they are 32bit, and/or 64-bit capable ? I'm waiting for a reply from them.- anybody know if these are good? 2./ It would be great if RaidCORE http://www.ciprico.com/solutions-raidcore.html had driver support for OpenSolaris since you can create arrays across these controllers but unfortunately you gotta use their software VST pro stuff -but I'm not exactly sure. These look really interesting but I'd definitely need a fast CPU/MB combo since their Raid functions are primarily Host based. I just don't understand for example, why these guys don't make controllers that are ZFS-based ? -meaning just let ZFS do the crunching for your JBOD's ? Anyway, of course Sun's Thumper :) http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4540/ would obviously be "perfect", but I just can't convince our small company to leave NETAPP :( yet! Any advice as to hardware-wise if I heading down a "safe" path with the above gear and OpenSolaris/ZFS ? or would you recommend..... ? thanks, and regards. Rick. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
