Hello All,

As mentioned before in this ng, I'm new and a little busy composing a small
san environment. Currently I'm looking on eBay to find some hardware but
can't find (or pay) an all-in-one solution that fits my needs.

I would like to use a disk array with onboard raid controller (raid 50) and
a fibre channel interface. Now I've found two separate devices: Dell
Powervault DAE 630F with fibre-channel and Eonraid 2000r2 SAN fibre-channel
raid controller.

The Powervault does not have any raid controller onboard, the Eonraid is an
external box equipped with six fibre-channel interfaces. Now I'm curious if
this could be shaped in a working san. Of course I've read the data-sheets
and therefore I'm almost sure this should work like a normal san (not that
I'm a san expert). But I just want to check it with you guys, it does
concern a lot of money for a single person and I don't want to buy expensive
stuff that is useless to me.

EonRaid 2000R2: http://www.infortrend.com/legacy_er2000.asp

So, someone have any experience or opinions about this matter?

Sincerely,
Marcel

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Marcel wrote:
> Now I've found two separate devices: Dell
> Powervault DAE 630F with fibre-channel and Eonraid 2000r2 SAN fibre-channe
l
> raid controller.
> The Powervault does not have any raid controller onboard, the Eonraid is a
n
> external box equipped with six fibre-channel interfaces. Now I'm curious i
f
> this could be shaped in a working san.

It depends what you define as a SAN (or what you need a SAN for...).
Usually this includes at least one Fibre Channel switch, since the SAN is us
ed
to allow a bunch of hosts to do IO to a bunch of storage over a fabric.

Now with this Eonraid, it seems that you have 4 or 6 FC ports you can connec
t to
either storage or hosts, and then you configure it to map luns on one or mor
e
WWNs to Raided disk volumes.

It seems to me it lacks one of the key features of a SAN, which is
extensibility. A configuration with a proper RAID box and a switch can grow 
both
in number of hosts and number of raid boxes. Your config will be limited bot
h in
the number of hosts and the number of disks.

Arne

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"Arne Joris" <nospam@org.org> schreef in bericht
news:Dp8Xc.9200$A8.3082@edtnps89...
> Marcel wrote: 
fibre-channel[vbcol=seagreen] 
an[vbcol=seagreen] 
if[vbcol=seagreen] 
>
> It depends what you define as a SAN (or what you need a SAN for...).
> Usually this includes at least one Fibre Channel switch, since the SAN is
used
> to allow a bunch of hosts to do IO to a bunch of storage over a fabric.
>
> Now with this Eonraid, it seems that you have 4 or 6 FC ports you can
connect to
> either storage or hosts, and then you configure it to map luns on one or
more
> WWNs to Raided disk volumes.
>
> It seems to me it lacks one of the key features of a SAN, which is
> extensibility. A configuration with a proper RAID box and a switch can
grow both
> in number of hosts and number of raid boxes. Your config will be limited
both in
> the number of hosts and the number of disks.
>
> Arne

I didn't expect to grow as it is for a small (home) network.. I'll just wait
untill I've received a tutorial book that I've ordered last week. That
should improve my knowledge of san before I start buying hardware. Although
I did see some nice hardware with fair prices.

Marcel

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