The Newbee's Back With Some Blade and SAN Questions

[DHerrick]

I fought all day yesterday trying to get a SAN up and running in a C3000 blade enclosure. It never occurred to me that there might be something wrong with the Qlogic QMH2426 Mezzanine card in my BL680c G5 server. I put a new one in first thing this morning and after updating some firmware, Windows 2008 X64 can now see my MSA2212fc Array and my MSL6030 Tape Library. Anyway, I have only one AJ820A SAN switch. I'm a cheapskate. You have to be in this economy. I know 2 are recommended. Is it possible, to use both of the QMH2426's fiber connections for better performance, not redundancy? Right now one port shows good and the other "loop down". Can I use zoning to get both QMH ports running with one SAN switch or is this unsupported?

The other issue coming up has to do with tape blades and storage blades. From reading the documentation, it looks like a blade server can support only one storage blade or one tape blade. Looks like extending the bus by means of daisy chaining isn't possible. Is this correct? The problem with this is, if I want to add a second tape drive, I lose 2 blade slots, it costs an extra 3K for another server and the second one isn't local. And the same thing happens when you try to increase local disk storage beyond the two in the system enclosure and the 6 in the storage blade. Are these limitations correct?

[Daniel Bowers]

>>Looks like extending the bus by means of daisy chaining isn't possible. Is this correct?

Correct. Only one expansion blade (either tape or storage) can attach to a server blade. No "daisy chaining", no way to attach two directly to a single server blade.

If your goal is just a way to get more storage *inside* a single enclosure, you could use an X1800sb or a LeftHand VSA to connect the drive space on multiple blade servers together to present a single iSCSI-based SAN to other blade servers. That could yield more drive capacity than than a single server blade + SB40c could have. Doing something external to the enclosure would probably be simpler, though.

[The Brit]

Two questions!

Q1. Which Mezz Slot is your Mezzanine card in??
Q2. Which interconnect bay is your AJ820A in?

Dave.

[DHerrick]

Dave

The AJ820A is installed in the C3000 in Interconnect Bay 3 and the QMH2426 is installed in Mezz Slot 2. It's type II and it's in the left rear section of the BL680c G5.

Dennis

[The Brit]

Dennis,
With the HBA in Mezz 2, then only port 1 maps to IC Bay 3, (port 2 maps to IC Bay 4).

The only option that I can see would be to put the HBA on Mezz 1, and the SAN switch in IC Bay 2. From Mezz 1, both ports map to IC Bay 2.

I know there is some relevence to the "Type II" thing, but I'll be honest, I don't remember exactly what that is.

If you have already considered this option then I apologise.

Dave.

[Daniel Bowers]

The QMH2462 (the 4Gb FC HBA) is a "Type I" card. It will go into any mezzanine slot.

Of the 3 mezz slots on BL680c G5, slot 1 can *only* use a "Type I" card. The other two mezz slots can take either a "Type I" card or "Type II" card.

A Type II card is physically slightly larger, and can consume slightly more power, than a Type I card.

[DHerrick]

Thanks Dave and Daniel. I moved the FC Mezz card to slot 1 and tried again. However, only one port was live there too. But, it doesn't make any difference now. I'm just testing. For my next trick, I'm going to abandon FC entirely and connect an MDS600 storage box to a blade server via 2 SAS Switches instead. 2 SAS in the hand are cheaper than one FC the bush anyway. I just hope the performance is there. I'm expecting an HP quote by Friday.