17 Sep
2010
17 Sep
'10
10:43 a.m.
On 9/15/10 12:39 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
(sorry for the late entry, I've been on the road)
You're talking about the Enterprise series, which contains models
such as E3000, E3500, E6500, etc. If the second digit is '0', it uses
SCA-80 SCSI. If the second digit is '5', it's a later model which has
native FibreChannel. FibreChannel drives use SCA-40 connectors.
The Exx00 series take the same proc/mem boards, each of which can
carry up to two 64-bit UltraSPARC-II processors and 2GB or (IIRC) 4GB of
memory. The higher-numbered machines (the first 'x' in Exx00) simply
have more slots for those proc/mem boards.
The lower-level members, I'll use the E3500 as an example, are
self-contained machines with internal drive bays. The E3500 can take
four proc/mem modules in the back and has eight FibreChannel drive bays
in the front. The drives mount on standard "spud" brackets as are used
in the much older machines like the Ultra2.
Ex000 machines are pretty old these days, but Ex500 machines hold
their own quite well, especially for server workloads like email and
database stuff. My company still has two of these in production.
Some of the more recent high-end Sun machines have native
FibreChannel as well. Some examples are the Sun Fire 280r and the Sun
V480/V880. My company is running quite a few of the latter, and my
central computer here at home is a V480.
Current high-end Sun machines that support in-cabinet disks are
typically SAS, though most also have FibreChannel.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Some Sun boxes
apparently
take FC drives and you can make an adapter to hook them up to an HBA
in a PC.
Yes. ISTR machines of the SPARCserver 3000 and 5000 era (c. 1996)
might have been able to take the -FC drives directly, or at least
through an available drive shelf product of the same vintage. Stuff
from the early 1990s was pretty much all parallel SCSI, either narrow
or wide (I forget exactly how old wide-SCSI is).