[ILUG] SAN + fibre channel + linux

[Paul Jakma]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, John Moylan wrote:

> interested in hearing from anyone how has use Fibre Channel with 
> Linux. Emulex seem to be very well supported and not too expensive.

Proprietary driver though, whether that bothers you or not....

There's also QLogic, which are open drivers, supported by RedHat.

I wasnt particularly impressed with the driver, which had hard to 
pin-down stability issues, might very well have been due to the 
host-hardware though, it was only unstable on AMD boxes, however the 
driver did not deal well at all with errors/failures, and was weak, i 
felt. Apparently it's been rewritten for 2.6 to deal with the issues 
it had, never got to try it though.

The one thing about Fibre-Channel is, despite the technical 
advantages, you're in a very rarified atmosphere, far far away from 
commodity land. Make sure you have someone who will take ultimate 
responsibility if there are problems. (getting caught between two 
vendors, storage box and host-bus adapter vendor, is a bitter 
experience, given the prices).

And if you can find a commodity solution that does the job, go with 
that instead.

> JOhn

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
Even a hawk is an eagle among crows.