Some interesting comments a customer contact forwarded me

[chuckk281]

Chad had some comments from a customer regarding Boot from SAN:

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Has anyone ever heard anything like this? One of my customer contacts forwarded this to me that they heard from someone within their company:

The Emulex & Qlogic HP branded HBA cards have HP BIOS firmware on them.  They will only work properly when connected to an HP SAN system and therefore be useless for any DR servers in Dallas.

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Input from James:

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Having dealt with boot from SAN solutions in the past, the customers statement is almost entirely false.  To boot from SAN the following needs to happen:

1. The HBA has a BIOS capable of logging into the SAN Fabric and presenting its WWN to the SAN switch.
2. The HBA BIOS needs to be configured to search for the target LUN on their SAN storage
3. The SAN Fabric needs to be zoned to accept traffic from the HBA and send it to the target LUN
4. The SAN storage needs to be configured to present a LUN to the HBA WWN

None of these operations are vendor specific.  They are universal standards.  That being said there are some portions of Matrix functionality that work much better with 3PAR storage (SPM) than they do with 3^rd party storage vendors.  However this can still be manually configured. 

Some vendors only support certain levels of HBA firmware, but again they generally do not exclude support for Emulex or Qlogic HBAs.

Asking questions as to what they want to accomplish, and with what equipment, may be helpful in finding out what the real issue is that they are dealing with.

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