[ILUG] SAN + fibre channel + linux

[John Moylan]

Thanks Paul,


I think I'll give the FC stuff a miss then. And go for a couple of 8 
300Gb SATA disk 3ware card boxes with striped-mirrored disk pairs, Gb 
networking instead of the Fibre-channel and maybe with LVS and GFS(to 
replace NFS) thrown into the mix.


John


Paul Jakma wrote:
> 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,

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