[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Dave McGuire wrote:

>    Also...with FC-AL, there's a lot more in there than just cabling and
> power supplies.  The A5000 in particular has a touch screen on the
> front...You can power up & down each drive, get status and temperature,
> take either loop online on offline, etc.  You can also do all that
> stuff via software over the FC-AL interface.

Mmmmm.  Yummy.  I think I need to find some of this goodness the next
time I need more disc.

You know, a neat hack would be a small FC-AL box (like the Sun 611
form-factor) with either an FC-AL<->FDDI or FC-AL<->Ethernet "bridge"
board that has an IP stack and talks NFS/AFP/SMB.  Even neater would be
a way to stack or daisy-chain them for RAID.  At that point, you could
go nuts and make the multiple Ethernet ports (as a result of stacking)
talk EtherChannel for a fatter pipe to workstations.

I don't know how efficient such a product would be, but it'd be damned
cute, and probably easy enough for Joe Luser to use.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "We're Texans.  We figure out ways to do these
Elgin, TX          (    things..."                    --Bill Bradford