You can only connect 1 SB40 to 1 blade. So you can't cascade them.
In the future I believe there will be another storage blade that can be cascadable that more than one blade can use. (The SAN blade).
Looks like your only option is a blade with a mezzanine HBA, a FC Pass-thru and an MSA1000.
Or if you dont need the 1GB to be contiguous and can manage the content to fit a size barrier...
Use a BL480 full height blade with the PCIe mezz card to connect to a SB40c. Fit 4x 146 in the Blade and config as RAID5. Partition this as 20GB for the boot partition and 400GB as partition B. Partition 6x146GB in the SB40c as RAID5 and get 700GB as partition C.
Using the OS mount B as a subdirectory of C or vice versa and get 1.1TB.
Using the iSCSI protocol, systems can connect to remote storage and use it as a physical disk although the remote storage provider, or â target,â may actually be providing â virtualâ physical disks.
What about performance in case of Blade + iSCSI ? vs. Proliant DL360+ SmartArray+MSA50 for example ? Cost of blade + iSCSI is much higher ....
For many years we used Proliant ML/DL servers (since Proliant 1200 in 1998.....). But in government tender finished month ago (we are government agency) IBM win in not-blades category and HP win in blades category. Therefore we check now option to buy HP blades or IBM x3550/x3560 severs. Currently we need to upgrade our FileNet application servers in 6 remote offices (storage space needs from 700 Gb till 1.6 Tb depend on office)
BTW: When I checked IBM x3550 + EXP-3000 DAS I surprised that IBM still don't have 2.5" 15k SAS drives for servers and don't have 2.5" SAS drives for external storage at all. Also, maximum memory for IBM MegaRaid controller (SmartArray analogue) is 256 Mb...
iSCSI is slow, don't use for anything but file I/O. On GbE don't expect more than about 50MB/sec sustained throughput.
My recommendation at this point in time would be to use an MSA1000 (or MSA1500) with 7 x 300GB 3.5" disks. The drives are cheaper than SAS with more expansion capabilities (bigger disks and more drive shelves). At a later stage you can deploy the MSA1000 in ILM or mezzanine backup configuration. The downside to this will be that you will need SAN switches etc.
I am newbie in SAN, so sorry for stupid questions: -what about SAN storage performance vs. DAS storage ? - MSA1000 has Fibre Channel host interface, which card I need on Blade server in order to connect Blade to MSA1000 ? -MSA1000/1500 use SCSI and I am under impression that SCSI is "out of date" now (and 3.5" drives as well).. SAS and 2.5" drives is more modern.. Am I right in thinking ?
>>At a later stage you can deploy the >>MSA1000 in ILM or mezzanine backup configuration
I didn't understand this, can you explain a little more about ?
I'm a big fan of the MSA1000/1500 product line, very capable equipment at very reasonable prices, fits in really well with blades.
In order to fit an MSA1000 or an MSA1500 (if you need more than 12tb of storage go with the MSA1500) you will bare minimum need the following:
MSA1000 chassis that has one fibre port on the back SCSI disks for the MSA1000
on the C7000 enclosure you will need blade brocade 4/12 switch (or 4/24 if you plan on using more than 10 servers) a qlogic mezzanine card for each server
and one fibre cable to connect the MSA1000 to the brocade 4/12 switch
If you want redundancy you will need to add another brocade switch, a redundant MSA1000 controller + IO module and another cable.
The performance of MSA1000 is very favorable, able to pull off 150mb/s transfers pretty well. If you boot off of a SAN you will see Windows boot faster than ever before :)
Oh and I forgot to say I have used an MSA1000 and a C-Class system in conjunction. Booted off the MSA1000 (no internal disks or anything!) for 12 systems and performance was very good.
It doesn't appear that there's any way to cascade shelves.
I've heard it rumoured that there are plans to repackage an EVA into a blade package, which will hopefully allow for storage over 1TB. I'm not sure on timescales though.
An EVA in a blade would be pretty nice, just cascade some fiber disk shelves off your integrated Brocade 4/12 or 4/24 and you have storage.
What I think is missing from a really good 'all blade' solution is a full-height tape changer. A single LTO-2 tape drive does not cut it for virtually any scenario where I would look at putting blades in. In order for me to do a good all-blade solution I need a MSA1000/MSA1500 and a MSL2024 FC. It is a good fit for certain sizes of blade deployments, but is hard to fit in the market segment the C3000 is targeted at.
