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Home > Archive > Data Storage > October 2004 > Clariion Drive array help
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Clariion Drive array help
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| Mike Blanchard 2004-10-27, 8:45 pm |
| I just picked up a Drive array for a really great price from a local
auction from a business that was going under. This device was tucked
in a corner and it was doubtful that it worked (it powered up fine
when I got it home). This business didn't have any other EMC
equipment either. I don't think anyone knew what it was other than
harddrives and really heavy. Even the auctioneer called it a set of
non-working harddrives for a computer or something to that matter ;-)
Anyway, here's my problem. It turns out that this drive array was
meant for a Clariion CX700. It has 15 drives in it and HSSDC
connectors on the back of the unit. It is a Fiber Channel -
Arbitrated Loop array. I picked up an HSSDC interface card off of
E-bay, and a couple of cables (3, 3 foot cables and one 12 meter
cable). I'm now trying to use this unit to no avail. The back of the
array has two HSSDC modules, both with two connectors each (0 and 1).
My question is this: Is it at all possible to use this drive array
without the Clariion Service Processor? I figured that I'd be able
to, just like I'd be able to use a SCSI drive array basically.
I'm going to try and do more research, but if anyone here has any
ideas, I'll be more than happy to listen to them.
thanks all!
Mike B
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| On 27 Oct 2004 17:16:58 -0700, Mike Blanchard wrote:
[snip]
>It turns out that this drive array was
>meant for a Clariion CX700.
[snip]
> My question is this: Is it at all possible to use this drive array
>without the Clariion Service Processor? I figured that I'd be able
>to, just like I'd be able to use a SCSI drive array basically.
Mike,
As you clearly realise, this disk tray, known as a DAE2, was meant to
be attached to a CX SP - hence the FC-AL nature of the tray.
I can't give you any advice on using the whole tray of disks - but if
you do get them to work, they'll be JBOD so if you want RAID
protection you'll have to use something else to achieve that. I don't
know of any reason that it wouldn't work - you might need to play
around with the settings on your card.
I'm wondering if you have a cabling problem or an addressing issue -
that 12m cable is too long!
Alternatively, you could whip the disks out of their carriers and
you'll find that they're pretty standard FC disk drives or possibly
(but very unlikely, I'd guess) very high capacity ATA drives. They
may well have EMC firmware on them, but should still work normally.
Best advice I can give you... do a Google search for the term:
DAE2 hardware reference
A nice PDF is available from Dell's website - this is the engineering
hardware manual for your disk tray.
Enjoy!
HVB
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| Nik Simpson 2004-10-28, 7:46 am |
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In what way can't you use the array, are the drives visible to the host at
all? One thing that might cause problem is that at the low level Clariion
drives are formatted at 520bytes/sector not the standard 512, usually this
is hidden behind the array controller so the host never does it, but if you
hook the array up as dumb JBOD then the host will probably have a hissy fit
over the drive formatting and refuse to have anything further to with the
drives.
BTW - I may well be wrong, the 520 vs. 512 byte sector formatting was
certainly the case in the past, I can't say for certain if its still the
case.
--
Nik Simpson
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| Mike Blanchard 2004-10-28, 5:45 pm |
| "Nik Simpson" <n_simpson@bellsouth.net> wrote in message news:<q15gd.5$936.3@bignews4.bellsouth.net>...
> In what way can't you use the array, are the drives visible to the host at
> all? One thing that might cause problem is that at the low level Clariion
> drives are formatted at 520bytes/sector not the standard 512, usually this
> is hidden behind the array controller so the host never does it, but if you
> hook the array up as dumb JBOD then the host will probably have a hissy fit
> over the drive formatting and refuse to have anything further to with the
> drives.
>
> BTW - I may well be wrong, the 520 vs. 512 byte sector formatting was
> certainly the case in the past, I can't say for certain if its still the
> case.
The host isn't seeing the drives at all and there isn't any
indication that anything is hooked up to the host adapter. The HBA is
a Giganet CLAN1000, and I have one cable hooked up to that going to
the drive array. There isn't a service processor on the drive array,
it's just the drive array, model number p2gbit-DAE. I'm using the
management console that comes with the CLAN1000 card.
I only have the one cable coming from the back of the array to the
HBA, as that's all the connections on the HBA there is, just the one.
thanks Nik!
Mike B
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| Nik Simpson 2004-10-29, 7:45 am |
| Mike Blanchard wrote:
> "Nik Simpson" <n_simpson@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
> news:<q15gd.5$936.3@bignews4.bellsouth.net>...
>
> The host isn't seeing the drives at all and there isn't any
> indication that anything is hooked up to the host adapter. The HBA is
> a Giganet CLAN1000,
Are, that's your problem, the Giganet card isn't a Fibre card with a HSSDC
connector, it's a networking interface, and never the twain shall meet. You
need a Fibre Channel HBA, not a NIC to talk to the drives. Hope this helps
;-)
--
Nik Simpson
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| Mike Blanchard 2004-10-29, 5:45 pm |
| Ahhhh, darn. Back to the drawing board then :-(
thanks Nik!
"Nik Simpson" <n_simpson@bellsouth.net> wrote in message news:<2uethuF265304U1@uni-berlin.de>...
> Mike Blanchard wrote:
>
> Are, that's your problem, the Giganet card isn't a Fibre card with a HSSDC
> connector, it's a networking interface, and never the twain shall meet. You
> need a Fibre Channel HBA, not a NIC to talk to the drives. Hope this helps
> ;-)
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| Mike Blanchard 2004-10-30, 2:45 am |
| Hmmm... the docs say that the CL1000 is made for SANs... Here is the
writeup on the card, any ideas? I was just about to bid on another
hssdc HBA, but thought I'd look at this card's specs again.
Mike B
You are bidding on a Emulex / Giganet cLan CL1000 1GB/s Fibre Channel
PCI SAN Host Bus Adapter (HBA).
Major Features:
Multiple OS/platform support including Windows 2000, Windows NT and
Linux
32/64 bit, 33MHz PCI host adapter
1.25Gb/s link speed (2.5Gb/s bi-directional)
Single chip virtual interface architecture implementation
Ultra low CPU overhead
Ultra low latency—7.5µs typical
RapidFlow architecture eliminates data loss due to network congestion
Specifications :
Standards Compliance
Virtual Interface architecture
SNMP traps, TCP/IP, NDIS
Architecture
32/64 bit 33MHz PCI 2.1 compliant
1.25Gb/s full duplex link (2.5Gb/s bi-directional throughput)
1024 virtual circuits per port (1024 virtual interfaces, 1024
completion queues)
Nearly 1GB mapped memory
Cabling: copper quad axial, HSSDC, 30 meters
System Requirements
32MB available memory
32 bit or 64 bit PCI slot, 33MHz
10MB available disk space
Hardware
Intel based platforms
Software Environments
Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux
cLAN software support
VI driver, TCP/IP driver, cLANview management tool
cLAN Management Console, NDIS
Winsock Direct provider available
exibar@thelair.com (Mike Blanchard) wrote in message news:<cc0872df.0410291453.37a6ac52@posting.google.com>...[vbcol=seagreen]
> Ahhhh, darn. Back to the drawing board then :-(
>
> thanks Nik!
>
>
> "Nik Simpson" <n_simpson@bellsouth.net> wrote in message news:<2uethuF265304U1@uni-berlin.de>...
| |
| Nik Simpson 2004-10-30, 7:45 am |
| Mike Blanchard wrote:
> Hmmm... the docs say that the CL1000 is made for SANs... Here is the
> writeup on the card, any ideas? I was just about to bid on another
> hssdc HBA, but thought I'd look at this card's specs again.
>
> Mike B
>
> You are bidding on a Emulex / Giganet cLan CL1000 1GB/s Fibre Channel
> PCI SAN Host Bus Adapter (HBA).
>
>
I think the original seller doesn't know the difference between a NIC that
uses Fibre as opposed to twisted pair media. Just because a card has a Fibre
interface doesn't mean its a Fibre channel card.
The CLAN card was designed for server/server hi-speed comms using Servernet
and related methods.
> Standards Compliance
>
> Virtual Interface architecture
> SNMP traps, TCP/IP, NDIS
Note these are all network standards, no mention of support for Fibre
channel which is a completely different protocol.
>
> VI driver, TCP/IP driver, cLANview management tool
> cLAN Management Console, NDIS
> Winsock Direct provider available
>
Again, all network, no Fibre Channel.
--
Nik Simpson
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