ethernet and switches, was Re: [rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Eric Dittman]

> > Most big companies use some kind of FC SAN.  If you buy stuff off
> > eBay FC is also affordable for home since FC disks seem to be
> > inexpensive. The only thing you'd need would be a FC backplane (or
> > use T-cards) to connect the drives.
> 
> FC generally sucks, due to its lack of standardiztion.  It's easy to 
> find gear, switches, and enclosures/drives that don't work together, 
> although this should be getting better.

It's also easy to find all those that do work together, esp. if you avoid
EMC.  Most of the time when I hear people are having FC trouble there's
an EMC involved.  The Hitachi, IBM, and HP (esp. the pre-HP Compaq stuff)
FC equipment all work extremely well in my experience, even cross-platform.
We've got Petabytes of storage at work across all the different FC equipment
where I work and the only thing that gives anyone trouble seems to be EMC.

I'd say FC works and works well.

> I managed to pick up 4.8TB of FC storage + another 1.4TB for my S/390 
> for $2700 just recently.  That's $0.43/GB.  Not too bad (although it's 
> fairly large/power hungry, being a total of 5 racks in size: 2 for the 
> FC and 3 for the S/390 (EMC) system).

Good luck on the EMC.

> > The new SATA and serial SCSI look interesting since SATA uses the
> > SCSI command set (and IIRC can be connected to serial SCSI
> > controllers, but I could have that backwards).  The only drawback
> > with SATA is the one drive/controller limit.
> 
> Well, you can't put more than one drive on a cable.  You can certainly 
> have more than one drive on a card, although anything more than a 4 
> drive card costs way too much.  Yes, I realize you said "controller", 
> but most people would take that to mean "controller card". :)

If anyone reads "controller card" into "controller" then they probably
shouldn't try to build their own systems.  :-)

The problem with lumping all the controllers onto one card is you are
going run into a problem with bandwidth.  If you only have two controllers
on a card (which seems to be pretty common) then you are going to run into
a problem with PCI slots.

I still can't believe that they went the wrong way with drives/controller.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net