On May 11, 2007, at 11:37 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote: This is about as off-topic as can be, but I use a lot of FC storage at home and at work, so I can answer your questions below. Lots of bigger Suns have integral FC storage...Ex500, Sun Fire x80R, etc. It verrah nice. :) First, controller cards..."HBA" (Host-Bus Adapter) in FC parlance. FibreChannel is basically the SCSI command set over a very different, very fast, very well-designed communications medium that can also be used for other protocols such as TCP/IP. There are HBA cards available for all the major buses you'd be worried about (PCI and its later variants, Sbus, etc) from both Sun and other manufacturers (JNI, HP). There are different speeds of FC...1Gbps is the most common, with 2Gbps becoming more common and less expensive nowadays. 4Gbps is becoming available. Generally speaking, the people who aren't worried about upgrading for the sake of upgrading are saving thousands of dollars by sticking with 1Gbps FC. For 1Gbps FC on a PCI machine, the HBA cards to look for are Qlogic QLA-2100/QLA-2200 series, Emulex LP7000/LP8000, or JNI FCI-1063/FCE-6410 series, depending on platform and OS. For Sbus, I recommend a JNI FC64-1063. All of the above are available cheaply on eBay (for example) at any given time. Expect to pay anywhere from $10 to $30. JNI's drivers don't readily support Solaris10, but work fine with earlier releases. Qlogic QLA-2200 (and up) cards work out-of-the-box with Solaris10, and drivers are available for earlier releases. The Qlogic cards also work fine with the BSDs and Linux. Emulex has drivers for various releases of Solaris. SGI machines will use the Qlogic cards. FC HBA cards vary in the type of interface they present. Fiber is generally on FC connectors (assuming 1Gbps FC...other speeds use different connectors), and copper is usually on an HSSDC connector (looks like a flat/wide RJ-series connector) but may be on a DE-9. Some HBA cards have a slot for a GBIC, which is a plug-in physical layer interface module that's the same idea as an Ethernet transceiver, and can have any of the above types of external interfaces. Now you need a way to talk to the drive. If you want to put just one drive in a chassis (which is NOT how FC was designed to work, but enterprising folk have produced the necessary hardware), you need what's known as a "T-card". Do an eBay search for these...they are cheap, a few dollars apiece if memory serves. It plugs into the back of the drive and breaks out the power connector to a standard drive connector, the device select pins to a jumper block, and the FC interface itself to other connectors, usually a DE-9. They usually have provisions for daisy-chaining more than one T-card together for multiple drive use. Get one of those, plug it all in, and you're all set. For more than one or two drives, you should get an "FC chassis". These are cheap and readily available...for the "bare bones" ones (most of them out there fall under this category) it basically functions like a whole bunch of T-cards strung together (but of course isn't implemented as such). Most FC chassis will usually have either GBIC sockets, DE-9 or HSSDC connectors for FC over copper. One series I'm partial to is made by EuroLogic, commonly available as "NetApp FC shelves" such as the FC-7, FC-8, and FC-9. These are cheap and readily available on eBay...I bought an FC-9 on eBay full of 36GB drives *three years ago* for, I think, $80. The FC-[789] are almost identical, have copper FC interfaces on DE-9 connectors (daisy- chainable to multiple chassis, FC supports 126 devices per chain), have slots for seven drives in hot-swap cans and have dual power supplies. They are LOUD (think "hair dryer") but they are built like tanks and are cheap & readily available. Another nice chassis is the Sun A5100/A5200. These are gorgeous, have a nice built-in monitoring system with keypad & display, and have GBIC slots to support whatever FC interconnect medium you want to use. The A5100 holds 14 1.6"-height drives and the A5200 holds (IIRC) 21 1"-height drives, all on standard Sun "Spud" brackets. Later, you can pick up an FC switch (same idea as an Ethernet switch, for the same reasons), hang your FC chassis off a switch port, and plug all of your machines into other switch ports. The obvious thing will happen. If you want to mount filesystems on multiple machines simultaneously, be sure the filesystem supports that, or make sure only one of the mounts is read-write. A nice 8- port FC switch can be had anytime on eBay for less than $40. All of this stuff falls under the "just plug it in and it works" category. My personal FC installation consists of a pair of DEC HSG80 FC RAID controllers in a redundant failover configuration plugged into a Compaq (relabeled Brocade) 8-port FC switch, an HP 40- slot FC-connected DLT8000 juke plugged into another port, and five Sun boxes (Sun Fire 280R, E3500, multiple Netra T1-105s). I have a NetApp FC-7 and FC-9 that I just decommissioned after moving data onto the FC-connected RAID array. This used to be the answer, but not anymore. :-) It's definitely worth exploring. The performance and reliability are great, parts are readily available, and OS support is widespread. If you move in this direction, feel free to contact me directly for assistance or advice. I've done a lot with FC (I won't trust large amounts of data to anything else!) and can point you in the right direction and/or help you find the right stuff to do what you want to do. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL