Small Sun development lab

[Kate]

I have recently accepted a job that has a development lab with a lot of Sun equipment, fiber infrastructure, and more. Consequently I have worked with neither very much before. Over the last few weeks I have been trying to find the right answer for this situation:

What do you do with several X4540's, several X4270 M2's, a weak copper network (1Gb), Fiber Channel HBAs in everything (but not connected to anything), unused fiber switches, and a huge demand for fast data storage?

There is no room for port bonding due to lack of interfaces on our ethernet switches so obviously something has to be done with this fiber infrastructure that is completely unused (dont ask i have no idea).

Clearly I have much storage available on top of these Sun servers that get to enjoy the greatness of ZFS, but if all I got to serve the data is a single 1 Gb ethernet port- I feel nauseous. I have all my ZFS platforms capable of writing at over 1 GBps, but I can't even wake them up with 1 Gb of network i/o.

I want to utilize this fiber infrastructure. The only thing I have found thus far is the COMMSTAR project. UNFORTUNATELY: This particular organization will NOT budge on moving away from Solaris 10. So I cannot run OpenSolaris. Anyone have ideas or suggestions?

Thanks!

[Erik Trimble]

Post by Kate
What do you do with several X4540's, several X4270 M2's, a weak copper network (1Gb), Fiber Channel HBAs in everything (but not connected to anything), unused fiber switches, and a huge demand for fast data storage?
There is no room for port bonding due to lack of interfaces on our ethernet switches so obviously something has to be done with this fiber infrastructure that is completely unused (dont ask i have no idea).
Clearly I have much storage available on top of these Sun servers that get to enjoy the greatness of ZFS, but if all I got to serve the data is a single 1 Gb ethernet port- I feel nauseous. I have all my ZFS platforms capable of writing at over 1 GBps, but I can't even wake them up with 1 Gb of network i/o.
I want to utilize this fiber infrastructure. The only thing I have found thus far is the COMMSTAR project. UNFORTUNATELY: This particular organization will NOT budge on moving away from Solaris 10. So I cannot run OpenSolaris. Anyone have ideas or suggestions?
Thanks!

Solaris 10 doesn't support FC target mode.

You have three major options:

(1) Get your company to allow you to buy and use Nexenta for the X4500
machines.

(2) Get an Oracle Support contract for the X4500s, which will allow you
to use and get support for Solaris 11 Express.

(3) Run some flavor of Linux on them.

All three of the above options allow the use of Fibre Channel Target
Mode for the HBAs in the X4500, which in turn allows you to serve out
the data via FC to hosts.



As horrible as it sounds, #2 is likely the cheapest option.

[Kate]

Thanks Erik for the reply Erik. I beleive option 2 will be the most likely thing to happen in my situation as well, so I'll have to suck this one up. On top of Solaris 11 Express, is my only option COMMSTAR or is there anything else I should look at?

Thanks so much for help

[Erik Trimble]

Post by Kate
Thanks Erik for the reply Erik. I beleive option 2 will be the most likely thing to happen in my situation as well, so I'll have to suck this one up. On top of Solaris 11 Express, is my only option COMMSTAR or is there anything else I should look at?
Thanks so much for help

COMSTAR is integrated into Solaris 11 Express. It's just the codename
for the update and improvements to the networking stack. You'll be able
to use the FC target mode via the integrated FC management utilities.

S11Ex is the official Oracle successor to OpenSolaris, and is based on
the OpenSolaris codebase.