Netapp 4243
Jacinto Dieujuste
We have a FAS2050 which exports a volume of FC drives to a xenserver pool as an NFS storage repository, it contains the vhds of the Operative System of virtual machines. We have another SATA volume exported in the same way to the pool, but this one doesn't work due to its low performance, so it is intended for backups.
DS4243 allows 15K disks, which we know work fine for vm, but are quite more expensive than 10K drives, so we only can afford 10 disks of 450GB, on the other hand, DS2245 is smaller and cheaper, so we can afford 12 disk of 600GB or some more of 450GB, which allows more spindles, furthermore, this shelf works at 6Gbps instead of 3Gbps,like DS4243, but I can't find any comparative chart for latencies or something similar, and we are worried about 10k disk and vm repositories.
The 15K drives are 3.5" form factor and the 10K drives in the DS2246 are 2.5" form factor... with the smaller form factor, the performance is very similar between the two. For SAS, I prefer the DS2246 (love these shelves!) since they are fast, have a great form factor and use 2 PSUs instead of 4 PSUs on the larger shelf with SAS.
Interesting. I remember this being pitched when 2.5'' 10k disks were first introduced (not on NetApp platform, in general). Despite that I tend to somewhat treat them as "slower brothers" of 3.5'' 15k drives (& effectively ignore).
Refurbished NetApp DS4243 with 24x 1TB SATA X302A-R5 Disk Shelf achieves both storage and performance in a 4U form factor. The DS4243 has the ability to use performance SAS drives, SSD's or high-capacity SATA disk drives. This DS4243 is populated with twenty-four 1TB SATA Drives (X302A-R5) and comes with a 1-Year Parts Replacement Warranty and all necessary parts.
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I recently purchased some ds4243 shelves filled with 2tb sata drives. They have the standard iom3 modules. I would like to simply use them in a DAS setup at home. I have a rack and an IBM X3550 M4 server running windows server 2016. I would like to know if I can run these units directly to my server without the use of a netapp controller. If so, what kind of hba/sas/qsfp card can/should I use for my server? Can I install something like this ( NetApp X2065A-R6 HBA SAS 4-PORT Copper 3/6 GB QSFP PCIe 111-00341+B0) and use the standard qsfp cables or can I use an some other sas hba type card and get a qsfp to mini sas conversion cable or some other configuration I am not listing here?
I want to run these utilizing max space with no parity so I am thinking raid 0 config. Any help would be much appreciated as I would like to get the proper card ordered asap as the equipment is on its way.
QSFP is used for a number of different purposes - IB, Ethernet(4x10GB) and SAS - all are different - it doesn't define a logical connection. It's like RJ45. Usually it's Ethernet - sometimes its serial.
I understand your comment on "standard" SAS cables - we have elected not to in this instance. Our newer systems use miniSAS-HD (SFF-8644), but that wasn't the choice when this card and our SAS shelves were initially released.
It's (obviously?) not something we support or test, but Linux kernel has drivers for the X2065A-R6 card as a PMC PM8001 SAS controller, and will see the drives as normal 512byte sector SAS devices. I would suggest that approach.
Great thank you. Yes, of course I know this wouldn't be something officially tested I just thought someone in the community may have had some experience that could pertain to what I am trying to do. I found a cheap mezzanine card that my server supports with qsfp so if I can't utilize it I will go the route you suggested. (trying to use Windows before Linux)
Thanks Alex. Thankfully my enclosures are full of sata drives so that isn't going to be a hassle. Im currently trying to use a mellanox infiniband card which i have had no problems being recognized by my machine and windows. I have it direct connect to the jbod but I am just not getting any communication. My previous experience was with hp enclosures/sas and I didnt have any problems. I feel like Im just missing something but no idea at this point since infiniband is a different tech. Im wonderin if I should just get an sas card and get a qsfp to sas conversion cable.
I went with the infiniband card because of the qsfp cables that come with the shelf and i saw that one of the netapp controllers supported infiniband and it also supported the ds4243. Apparently that was a mistake. I didnt go with the netapp card right away because of worrying about compatibility issues with my server and that my server that I ended up with is 2u and wasnt sure it would fit (Two PCIe 3.0 slots: one PCIe 3.0 x16 low profile and one x8 half length, full height) the netapp card looks to be full height, full length but I cant tell for certain. Normal external sas cards use sas 8088 connectors and the cables i got with the netapp shelves are qsfp. Since i was buying a card either way, i thought i would go with a card that already had qsfp connectors and was compatible with the server i would be getting so i wouldnt have to buy a qsfp to sas 8088 cable. Am I missing something with the connection aspect of this? Please excuse my novice thoughts I am a little outside my realm atm but got a great deal on netapp enclosures full of drives which is why im trying to make them work.
No apologies necessary! I really appreciate the advice. There is one cheap on ebay I will pickup its just going to take a while to get here which is ultimately costing me money. I was thinking I could maybe pick up an sas hba card locally but if thats not going to do it then ill just get the other one ordered. Thanks again.
So I am thinking about getting another one, but all the cable guides show using 2 controller cards and 2 stacks and cabling them all together a special way., I am assuming for redundancy. I only have one controller, with 2 ports on the controller. This is how I would set it up?
Since you have 2 ports on your controller, just connect each port to the square SAS port on both your IOMs, that would give you 2 independent SAS paths for each shelf and they would be treated as separate entities by unraid.
When many drives on DS4246 were accessed along with DS2246 being accessed, there was a drop in speed on both types of drives, When separated (Not daisy chained) there was a 10%-15% increase in speed. but normal loads I do it made almost 0 difference.
If I imagine a 2 port HBA card as being a circle and a square, I believe you can wire it up like the bottom left component from the diagram in that post (and ignore the bottom right component which is there for redundancy).
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