[tech] SAN

Bob Adamson bob at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Thu Oct 7 22:12:13 WST 2010


On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Bob Adamson wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> If you haven't been in the clubroom over the last few months, you won't have 
> noticed the assortment of SAN parts that are dominating the place. I think 
> it's time we did something with them.
>
> We have:
> 2 shelves of 300GB disks
> 2 shelves of 146GB disks (one of which is the SAN controller)
> 1 shelf of 73GB disks
> 2 EMC DS-4700M fibre channel switches
> 1 UPS which is on the way out
>
> I think we could/should use the extra storage for better webcam footage 
> storage, but the disks are pretty heat intensive. My proposal is that we use 
> 1 switch, the controller and the 2 300GB shelves to make a miniature SAN. 
> This could also potentially replace the two shelves that are currently 
> attached to musundo.
>

So after many, many hours spent working on the SAN (and equivalent amounts 
of head scratching) I have finally got it set up. Thanks Nick and Frenchie 
for your help and advice with it.

UCC now has a couple of TB to play with, with redundant power supplies, 
redundant 2Gbps fibre connections with multipath support, and redundant
storage processors. The storage processors and FC switch are battery 
backed, so we can take advantage of the 2GB write cache. The UPS, which is 
actually an SPS, has got all new batteries in it, so we can trust it. All 
in all, a much more reliable setup than ucc has ever had, and fairly fast.

I only had enough rack space to mount the 2 shelves of 300GB disks and the 
controller shelf, so we have a couple of spare shelves, power supplies and 
disks.

All that really remains is to document it and connect it to a machine 
where it will be more useful than on my colo box.

Now. We need to work out the best way to make use of it. Let's mirror the 
internet... :P

[BOB]


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