Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array 149
skarphedin writes "There's an interesting story here on a do-it-yourself fibre channel array. These guys make one for under $250 and it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases." You know you want one.
Here's another way (Score:5, Funny)
2) Fly to Folkestone, England
3) Rent a sailboat
4) Sail to Calais, France, laying an array of fibre behind you
5) Congratulation on your Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array.
You forgot... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You forgot... (Score:4, Funny)
Store already slashdotted (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Store already slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Store already slashdotted (Score:1, Interesting)
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt
Seems like they should cost much more. A small business say a video shop could build one hell of a server with those. I guess its just surprising that they don't cost a lot more than some of the IDE drives I see there. Do you think there just not reliable anymore?
Re:Store already slashdotted (Score:2)
These big corporations used to buy hundreds, perhaps thousands of FC drives a few years ago. The drives back then were about 9 or 18 gigs in size, meaning that hundreds of drives were required for a sizeable array.
Now (as we also discovered), hundreds of drives have several disadvantages. Not counting the physical space
Ewwwww. (Score:4, Funny)
But seriously, I bet if I wired this in my dorm room I could get some mean negative pings in UT '03. Kinda like a 'spider sense' for the pc.
Re:Ewwwww. (Score:1)
No, I don't want one (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, if I just want performance, I will do better with SCSI, and even save some money.
In this respect, I don't quite see what kind of niche would the solution in the article cover.
Re:No, I don't want one (Score:5, Funny)
Could become some major FUD, though, Elmer.
You figure that your first outing or two might well have some flaws, and are certainly not ready for enterprise usage.
So you get the hang of it on some little implementations before you go for a big one.
Sort of the way you start up a little software test project and make sure you understand all of
the header, object, and API issues for that shiny new library you just got off of SourceForge
before you try to integrate something new with what you're _really_ working on.
As a business strategy, FUD is great. If we can keep people convinced that they _can't_ do it themselves, they're more likely to hire us at phat consulting rates.
Re:No, I don't want one (Score:5, Insightful)
At work we decommisioned a large Compaq 2 year old server with a nice raid setup and SAN connectivity running Novell to make room for our MS takeover. The last job this server performed was storage to allow us to boot workstations with a network floppy and create and restore desktop images and for general storage in the IT department. It wasnt to bad but we never really achieved any more then 2-3MBytes/sec when transferring files to and from it. We did not have our new MS server to replace it yet so I took a small footprint Compaq P-III desktop with 512MB ram and loaded RH on it, slapped in an extra 7200rpm Maxtor 160GB IDE drive. Installed Samba, joined it to our W2K domain and it works great. We pull and store multiple images to the thing at roughly 5Mbyte/sec per PC and it has a sustained thoughput of about 10-12Mbyte/sec per HD or per network card (I have two NICs and you can select which one to use from the client boot disk when you connect. It also lets us burn DVD's directly from a Windows workstation at 2.4 speed (3.5Mbytes/sec) which our Novell server could never handle (many buffer underruns or had to transfer image file to the PC first).
It does not have the redundancy of the old Novell server as I have a no raid setup but I back up the files using rsync to my other Linux machine on a daily basis and we have hundreds of other similar desktops I could grab parts from if needed. That desktop coast us about $600. that server was well over $5000.
I guess the point is, it does not have to say "Enterprise", server, or cost a lot of money to perform the work you may need.
The only other small problem is if I get hit by a bus they are screwed as the rest of the department has little interest in the headless Linux thing I have sitting on my desk. I am willing to explain it to anyone but being in a MS driven shop, so far only one person is interested. All they know is it currently works great.
Re:No, I don't want one (Score:3, Informative)
- the disk setup is not rendundant
- there is no documented disaster recovery plan
Would you be so candid to tell me what kind of enterprise are you working for?
Re:No, I don't want one (Score:1)
Let me rephrase my first paragraph.. Basically it states some things should be enterprise level when required and it is nice to have a CYA backup when you get stumped. Not all things in an enterprise NEED to be at such a level.
In my specific example, if all else fails, anyone in the office can crack out the DVD's and image the damn workstations manually if they wish.
From the Trenches (Score:3, Interesting)
From the Trenches (Score:1)
I got a db9-db9 cable and a hssdc-hssdc cable orgiinally, and ended up trying to solder them together. I'd never tried soldering shields together, and presumed it would take a while, but I kinda found out its pretty much impossible. So I just pulled on over the other and wire wrapped the hell out of it.
I suspect its because of the ca
Re:From the Trenches (Score:1)
Re:No, I don't want one (Score:1)
Re:No, I don't want one (Score:2)
Cheers.
I dont quite get it (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Huge expansivity
2) Faster speeds, esp. over LAN (Storage area networks)
Why would one want to use it in a home setup?
You probably are not going to buy more than 3 or 4 Harddisks. I say if you want speed use more RAM(*though you wont get much for $250 * results might vary). If you want expansivity(not too much) and relatively fast (depends on a lot of stuff) access speeds and standards based setup, may I suggest iSCSI [digit-life.com]
Re:I dont quite get it (Score:5, Interesting)
For the fun of doing it, for one thing. For instance, I have Token Ring, ATM and serial equipment in my home LAN. Why, when there is FE or even GigE? Because it's fun to play around with, and I learn a lot as well.
Second, you might get pretty darn good performance out of a relatively cheap setup. Modern ATA-drives are pretty fast, but the problem is, there's just a single spindle. Random access will kill your drive. A home-built FC array for the price of an ATA-drive will get you perhaps five to ten separate drives. Mostly, these drives will be 10k drives as well (Almost all ATA-drives are 7.2k or less). The slightly higher rotation speed combined with the fact that you've got a large amount of individual spindles gives you much better random access. Also, remember that ATA usually is a huge CPU hog, which adds to the performance bottleneck.
Re:I dont quite get it (Score:2)
Re:I dont quite get it (Score:1, Interesting)
And what good is mutliple fibre channels without EMC PowerPath for bandwidth balancing and failover?
Re:I dont quite get it (Score:2)
Because slightly obsolete FC hardware is DIRT CHEAP on eBay [ebay.com]. That, and it's kind of fun to install some "enterprise level" hardware at home.
Re:I dont quite get it (Score:1)
Supply remaining constant, demand increasing. Not cool.
Re:I dont quite get it (Score:1)
oh, and amazing perforance for cheap from ebay. sure, there's huge startup costs, but storage from then on is neigh on free.
Myren
How long you think... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How long you think... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:How long you think... (Score:3, Informative)
It's also comparing Apples to oranges.. the Apple XServe RAID has an FC interface to the host controller, ie the XServe, but only uses ATA HDDs internally. Apple's is expensive, yes, but for 2.4TB, it's a pretty damn good price.
Re:How long you think... (Score:1)
Have SCSI prices come down? Hot damn. I'm off to get some of that SCSI gear. I've been waiting for this for years.
Thanks Apple.
Gee... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, being a 'mac head' and a 'linux head' and a 'computer head' in general, I don't necessairly get the orig posters issue. Apple does a lot of cool things. And some things just happen to hit the Mac market before the PC market. Big deal. Why not bitch about Billy G. then?
My work has been setting up a FCA for the past
$250 my ass, try $1000+ (Score:2)
Yea, the $40.99 host is actually $858, pushing the whole project into the 'well over a grand' territory. I will blow 250 to enjoy working with a cool technology, even if i dont have an immediate need, but for a grand i can buy several nice u160 drives and stripe them since i dont 'need' FC.
I found the whole article pret
eBay prices (Score:1)
Re:Gee... (Score:2)
Re:Gee... (Score:2)
That is utterly wrong. If you look IBM's site [ibm.com], you'll see:
It's pretty obvious
Re:Gee... (Score:2)
The x440 is a NUMA machine. It takes special support added into the kernel to
Been there, almost done that... (Score:5, Interesting)
180GB ATA drive: $200
Qlogic FC host adapter: $40
10 18GB 10k drives (eBay): $99
10 T-cards: $50
UTP-cable: $20
--------------
Total: $209
Of course, there's the cost of running the array as well, which is the reason we never finished our project (We did get the hostadapter and built a couple of T-cards though). We calculated that our FC array would cost us an additional $2-300 in electricity every year. After getting hit with a $500 surprise electricity bill for our current equipment, we simply decided it wasn't worth it and got another IDE drive instead. Still, an interresting project. =)
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:1)
Who says electronics can't be fun...
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:1)
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:5, Informative)
QLogic 2100 copper, purchased on eBay for $32, shipping was about $8.
Check it out yourself, there's some on there right now for less than $30.
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:1)
Still with cheap gigabit adapters available for new and the speed of fast IDE discs then I shant worry.
Still your right with ebay part it CAN be done, so I stand corrected upon the question of the price; though still would like to see cheaper off the shelf parts. but it
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:2)
There's a reason why those cards that were $800 originally are only $40 now.
The 2200s and 2300s are still expensive for a reason too.
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:2)
And yes, there is a reason for why those cards are available cheaply. It's called "Upgrading".
The QLA 2100 is 1Gbps. Half duplex if I remember correctly. For modern FC Arrays, this is too slow. The QLA 2200 (1Gbps full duplex) and 2300 (2Gbps full duplex) are much more attractive, which is why they're still expensive. Big Corporations(tm) want to take advantage of the newer technology and upgrade to the newer standards. The older cards are re
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:2)
Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:2)
Nice .. but still just for play (Score:1)
Re:Nice .. but still just for play (Score:1)
File Locking (Score:5, Insightful)
Rus
Re:File Locking (Score:2, Informative)
fail over cluster.
far more common, and the file locking/sgi cxfs stuff doesn't even come into the picture.
Re:File Locking (Score:1)
Solutions (Score:1)
SCA40 Backplanes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SCA40 Backplanes (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks,
Matt
Re:SCA40 Backplanes (Score:1)
I've been buying shelves filled with drives rather then just drives just because sometimes it's cheaper that way. You can get a shelf with 7 36 GB drives on the market for about $3-4K now. Of course, it helps if you also have a Netapp head... then you get their awesome file system, etc... as well. That's the best argument for not building your own to me.
Re:SCA40 Backplanes (Score:1)
Re:SCA40 Backplanes (Score:1)
Only external? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only external? (Score:4, Informative)
Starting at Ultra320, Quick Arbitration is now available.
Given that this is cutting edge of parallel SCSI, I can understand Sun to skip anything older. However I yet have to see a significant performance gain from going from U2W (80 MB/s) to FC. Arbitriation might be slower on U2W, but FC contains routing informations in each packet, which parallel SCSI lacks.
Personally, I am very happy with the good old parallel SCSI. Even cutting edge drives like Cheetah 15k.3 are really fast, even when I cannot push them to their limit.
Article pages / project (Score:4, Funny)
I guess the fact that there is no normal "print version" link like MOST sites have is the most annoying. There is however a link to a PDF version [flickerdown.com] on the Very Last Page which helps, but html is much prefered.
And what's with the wood blocks that looked like they were cut with a chain saw or hacked apart with an exacto blade? Ever hear of sheet metal? Hell, at LEAST pick up a used DRIVE case instead of a TAPE case. Even NEW they are pretty cheap.
The CONCEPT of the project is interesting, but the implementation leaves MUCH to be desired.
Re:Article pages / project (Score:2)
Re:Article pages / project (Score:2)
Re:Article pages / project (Score:2)
Re:Article pages / project (Score:2)
Re:Article pages / project (Score:1)
What insult? He merely asked you a question.
We could put all the content on one page and that would do a great job of dragging the server down as everyone pulls everything. More than one page takes some pressure of the server.
Now, *that* is an insult.
Serving 12 pages with lots of ads is supposed to be less pressure than serving 1 modestly larger page?
Re:I think you're right (Score:1)
Re:Article pages / project (Score:1)
The ads totally invalidate any "concerns about bandwith" arguments. Two paragraphs of text or 30 paragraphs of text are going to be way less than even a couple image ads.
So, it's the ads. The pages were broken up to fit more ads.
Re:Article pages / project (Score:1)
Re:Article pages / project (Score:1)
Buddy, you need to be put in your place (Score:2)
from the.... (Score:4, Funny)
Why shouldn't it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should this be surprising? FC drives are in every single case SCSI drives with a different, more expensive, interface. Although they tend to be cheaper on the surplus market, which I think is the *real* point.
Wood?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Then he goes and mounts them in the case with wood!! Why? Its an insulator!!! Ok, maybe he didn't have the necessary metal skills (or equipment even) to make a custom bracket, but using wood to mount a drive just seems a bit dangerous to me.
Re:Wood?!?! (Score:1)
Re:Wood?!?! (Score:1)
Re:Wood?!?! (Score:2)
Re:Wood?!?! (Score:1)
Still, its a good idea.
Re:Wood?!?! (Score:1)
a Hoax story (Score:3, Interesting)
Robert
Re:a Hoax story (Score:1)
What a waste (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a waste (Score:2)
SCSI vs. Fiber Channel (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the Sun engineer's explanation of why FC is so interesting for servers:
1) The FC protocol has a 100MByte/s dedicated bandwidth to data. The communication between disks etc. will not interfer with this bandwidth.
2) Modern SCSI has two modes: one for data (burst mode) and one communication mode. The communication mode is a lot slower (first scsi standard) in order to remain compatible with older disks. This means that scsi is a lot more advantageous to users reading large files than small files.
This is where FC becomes interesting: If you have a striped disk array, you will read many small segments from different disks instead of large segments from single disks. In this special case, FC is faster than SCSI, even though it is "slower" by looking at the burst rates in the specs.
Re:SCSI vs. Fiber Channel (Score:2)
Uhhh, that's called RAID, and you can do it without FC. You can do RAID striping with IDE or SCSI hard drives that outperform a single SCSI drive.
Re:SCSI vs. Fiber Channel (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you can do raid with ide, scsi or whatever that outperforms a single disk. However, all disks sharing a bus also shares the total bandwidth of that bus.
What I'm trying to say is that when you have a stripe (=raid 0 or 0+1), FC is faster than SCSI because of the way the communication protocols work.
Nice But ...... (Score:2, Interesting)
I built a FC array last year... (Score:4, Interesting)
My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here [nuxx.net]) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.
There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here [nuxx.net]. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.
FibreChannel is not 1Gb anymore (Score:1)
Not with these drive modules... (Score:1)
General rule: If it doesn't AC decouple and doesn't actively terminate, or it does not use 0603 or *smaller* surface mount components, don't buy it. And, if it doesn't use shielded cables, laugh at the vendor! If any
Re:Not with these drive modules... (Score:1)
After 10 years of pretty much mass use of BBS'es and Internet systems you'd think spelling flames would have died out by now. Between the spam and dregs like this AC the net got killed. Thank you AOL.
The Internet -Died 1999 - R.I.P
Re:I would like one! (Score:1)
I have to say that makes me think of putting one under the stairs for redundant storage. Too bad the prices for the hardware would be doubled in Thailand.
Re:I would like one! (Score:4, Informative)
Too bad whoever wrote that was completely full of it. Fibre Channel does not exist over coax or twisted pair.
Coax really isn't used much for data cabling any more.
Twisted Pair? Who knows. I expect the error rates are too high for the extremely tight specs required by Fibre Channel.
SirWired
Shut up, idiot. (Score:1)
There are hundreds of examples of you being dead wrong on this. You are full of shit.
Re:Shut up, idiot. (Score:2)
Re:I would like one! (Score:1)
The usual connector types are HDSC (?) and DB9 (though this only uses 4 pins)
Copper makes a lot of sense for many fibrechannel uses. Connect multiple disk shelves together is the most common, since this only requires 1 foot cables, and copper is much more sturdy than optical, and lower cost for the connecters/interfaces.
Obviously there are limits to what copper can do, the most noticable is the 30M limit.
Re:I would like one! (Score:2)
Re:I would like one! (Score:2)
When I said Twisted Pair, I meant RJ-45 terminated. Oops. I do know about the DB-9 and HSSDC copper cables.
Both are acceptable (Score:2)
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fibre
From a google pov:
"fibre channel array" hit count = 2600
"fiber channel array" hit count = 213
Re:fiber, not fibre. (Score:1)
-J
Re:fiber, not fibre. (Score:1)
Re:Bah. (Score:1)