Hi, I asked the following recently: =======================original question========================= Does anyone know if the onboard FC-AL on a Sunblade 1000 will support a T3 Fibre Array Raid or do I need to get a PCI FC Network Adapter? If I do need to get the adapter then will I be able to use it in a Sunblade 100 instead of the sunblade 1000 and will the sunblade 100 be fairly good as a dedicated NFS server? Additionally will I be able to use Veritas Cluster software (NFS only) on a Sunblade 100? I'd quite like to use the netra T1 instead of a sunblade option but this only has the 1 PCI slot I understand so with the addition of FC card I would have no room for a gigabit ethernet adapter in the future. Unless I'm wrong :-) ==============================end=================== Thanks to Jed Dobson <jed@wgtech.com> & Tim Chipman <chipman@ecopiabio.com> for their excellent replies - which I attach verbatim below. Many thanks guys: 1. It looks like I can't use the onboard FC-AL on the sunblade 2. the combo card looks like a good bet. - I'm going to go with a Netra option probably the T1 (unless my supplier comes up with a good cost for the E1) and I'm going to get the combo card. Rgds Surinder ================= Tim Chapman ====================== Regarding FCAL in the Blade100: I recently tested an FCAL card / T3 combo in an Ultra5 (which has 33mhz, 32/64-bit PCI slots only) and the thing worked fine. The card is best used in a 66mhz PCI slots I expect (better bandwidth, they are typically found in "server grade" machines AFAIK) however it should be decent in the "vanilla" PCI slot. If the thing worked in an Ultra5, I cannot imagine there would be problems with a Blade 100. As for suitability of a blade100 for NFS server, should be fine but of course will depend on how hard you hit the poor thing with clients, etc etc. Clearly you want only low-access OS stuff on the internal IDE hard drive ; you may also want to add a 2nd HD for mirroring which would speed things up a bit and also provide some drive failure redundancy. Alas, no comments on the FCAL in the blade 1000. I'll be interested to hear the outcome. ============================end====================== ==========================Jed Dobson================= S.S.Di> Does anyone know if the onboard FC-AL on a Sunblade 1000 will support S.S.Di> a T3 Fibre Array Raid or do I need to get a PCI FC Network Adapter? No this is not a certified configuration. The on-board FC-AL is intended for the FC-AL Multipacks and other FC-AL loop devices. S.S.Di> If I do need to get the adapter then will I be able to use it in a S.S.Di> Sunblade 100 instead of the sunblade 1000 and will the sunblade 100 be S.S.Di> fairly good as a dedicated NFS server? Sure this should work fine. Since T3 is most likely going to be a rackmount version I would go with a Netra T1 AC 200. S.S.Di> S.S.Di> Additionally will I be able to use Veritas Cluster software (NFS only) S.S.Di> on a Sunblade 100? Sure Veritas is easy with their supported configs. This shouldn't be a problem - you will need a switch/hub however to have the T3 attached to two hosts. S.S.Di> I'd quite like to use the netra T1 instead of a sunblade option but S.S.Di> this only has the 1 PCI slot I understand so with the addition of FC S.S.Di> card I would have no room for a gigabit ethernet adapter in the S.S.Di> future. Unless I'm wrong :-) Good call. Use the Netra E1 to get a net-gain of 3 slots. This will support GigE and the FC-AL. Depending on needs you could use the new FC-AL/Gigabit ethernet combo card with a FC-AL loop device like the A5200, or FC-AL multipacks. http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hw/networking/connectivity/sungigabitethernet +fcal/index.html This would require using software mirror (NEVER NEVER use software RAID-5 for NFS servers !!! ) =========================end=================== ------------------------------------------------------------------ Surinder Singh Dio , School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences s.s.dio@gre.ac.uk , University of Greenwich, London, England. _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Thu Dec 13 06:41:12 2001
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