Without spare drive bays I don't think you're going to find one solution that works for x4500 and x4540 servers. However, are these servers physically close together? Have you considered running the slog devices externally?
One possible choice may be to run something like the Supermicro SC216 chassis (2U with 24x 2.5" drive bays): http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/216/SC216E2-R900U.cfm Buy the chassis with redundant power (SC216E2-R900UB), and the JBOD power module (CSE-PTJBOD-CB1) to convert it to a dumb JBOD unit. The standard backplane has six SAS connectors, each of which connects to four drives. You might struggle if you need to connect more than six servers, although it may be possible to run it in a rather non standard configuration, removing the backplane and powering and connecting drives individually. However, for up to six servers, you can just fit Adaptec raid cards with external ports to each (PCI-e or PCI-x as needed), and use external cables to connect those to the SSD drives in the external chassis. If you felt like splashing out on the raid cards, that would let you run the ZIL on up to four Intel X25-E drives per server, backed up by 512MB of battery backed cache. I think that would have a dramatic effect on NFS speed to say the least :-) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
