I am writing this on day 8, working an average of 16hrs a day straight. That’s 128 man-hours so far invested in getting this SAN built. It’s been operational for the past two days with one strange automatic server reboot that I haven’t looked into yet. I am sure the answer to that is in a log file somewhere.
Complicated is the word that comes to mind. This is the single most challenging IT related project I have undertaken to date. Building a open-source, low-cost, high-performance SAN from scratch is not for the timid, and certainly not for anyone without a working knowledge of the hardware involved or a fear of the command line. Linux knowledge is a prerequisite as many of the guides and helpful step by step how-to’s I will refer to were not totally self sufficient.
I know that this post will turn up in Google internet searches involving the terms “Openfiler”, “Openfiler 2.99.1″ and “Qlogic FC Target”, and to you who clicked on the link and ended up here, I want to say two things. First of all, it works, you can set up a SAN storage server with a fibre channel front end using Openfiler (as long as you stick to a Qlogic HBA), and secondly, if you absolutely cannot afford enterprise class hard drives, I am having no problems so far with my 16 Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB SATA drives. I am aware of the differences between enterprise class and desktop class drives, and the problems with ERC, and the decision to employ the cheaper desktop drives in this build was not mine. However, I did take precautions. I configured my RAID as 1+0, meaning each drive only has one pair in it’s “sub RAID” and then the 8 pairs of mirrored drives are striped RAID 0. So far out of all the problems I have had, none have been disk related. Time will tell if this remains the case.
Stay tuned for the next post where I’ll start getting specific.
The rack is coming together with the Netgear GS748T smart switch on top, Brocade Silkworm 4100 4Gb fibre switch and the SAN storage server. This is before the HP Proliant file server went in the rack too.
