[rescue] SBus FC-AL/SSA interface card?

[Brian Hechinger]

well, let me clarify first, we are talking about first generation Sun FC-AL
which only does 25MB/sec instead of GB/sec and secondly, never had any drives
with native FC-AL.  these things were allways fibre from host to disk array
which has regular SCSI drives in it.

however........

> So, with all this talk about fc-al on SBUS, I have a question.  How
> reasonable would it be to try to build a high performance (aiming for
> saturating FDDI link) raid 0+1 file server out of a SS2?  an
> SS5? SS10?  Doing this requires a minimum of CPU power, so it could be
> reasonable...

i don't think an SS2 would have a snowcone's chance in hell of ever doing that.
not enough CPU power to even push 100Mbit through a FDDI connection, let alone
from disk to FDDI.

MAYBE an SS5, but good luck finding a FDDI card that works in one (there is only
one model of FDDI card that works in the ss5, and i'm convinced they don't
really exist)

an ss10/20 with dual SM71 would probably be your best bet.  stack it with RAM
and set it to work.  you have to keep in mind that the bottleneck here is going
to be your 100Mbit FDDI.  you only need to be able to push ~10MB/sec and you'll
be able to saturate your FDDI.  so big fancy FC-AL arrays aren't needed.

> Just kicking around ideas.  FC-AL drives are so cheap.  But, that still
> leaves the cost of the FC-AL enclosures...

large amounts of storage that can go as fast as you need them too.  yeah, can't
argue with that. :)

-brian (who came >< that close to buying an FC-AL fabric switch on ebay)