[SunRescue] Excuse my gross oversimplification of RAID

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Christopher Byrne wrote:

> As to technical issues being the only reason why they removed the 12 bay
> MultiPack from their product line I'll have to disagree. I worked with
> several former Sun storage engineers who told me that they could have fixed
> the technical issues if the company wanted to bother, but that with their
> lower end SAN/NAS solutions coming in at the same capacity as the MultiPack
> (and for WAY more money, albeit with more capability) they didn't want to
> erode that market share.

There is no way to place 12 items on a UW SCSI bus and maintain UW SE bus
specs, period.  LVD was not shipping in the time frame when the 12-bay
MultiPack was discontinued.  If it had been, things might have been
different.

> I also agree with Mr. Lockwood in that if you need this level of storage you
> are most likely best served by another approach, it's just fun to speculate
> about having a TB array on your desk. Realisticaly for price/performance I
> would probably stick 36gig U160 disks in (about $700 a pop), or screw it and
> convert over to FC-AL. The great part about fibre channel is that the drives
> are reativley cheap, it's the cables and the HBA that really kills you. An
> FC-HBA can easily cost more than the computer it's attached to.

The high performance 64-bit PCI FC-AL adapter Sun ships is an off the
shelf QLogic QLA2100F/2200F.  If you don't mind the lack of a Sun logo,
you can easily save several thousand dollars on the adapter:

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=512566937
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=513252413

I'd love to upgrade to FC myself, but with over 250GB of SCSI storage in
my garage I don't think it will happen any time soon.  I have a love/hate
relationship with my Seagate Elite-9's, they suck space and power but seem
to be indestructable.

I'm glad Sun is now shipping FC for the desktop, hopefully this will drop
prices across the board.

-James