AH303A SAS HBA questions

[David Nixon]

Hello,

Am investigating available options for connecting external SAS devices to an rx3600.

My machine has the PCI-X backplane (option 100) and a Smart Array P600 with two mirrored drives; runnning Red Hat Enterprise Version 4, update 6.

Presumably I would need to swap in a
PCI Express backplane.

Could my P600 mirrored setup be retained?

Also how would an external SAS RAID be presented to the OS - what Linux driver would be required?

Why no PCI-X SAS HBA?

Thanks in advance for any information supplied.

DaveN

[TTr]

Based on the quickspecs http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12595_div/12595_div.HTML the PCIe backplane option still uses two PCI-X core slots. Presuming that the hardware path will remain the same for the existing P600 and its disks, you don't need to reinstall the OS. You can add the P800 to the non-core PCIe slots and connect external SAS storage.

[David Nixon]

Well if a P600 can be swapped
into a PCI-e PCI-X slot then
that would be fine.

Thanks

Sadly though the AH303A support matrix only mentions tape devices for Linux. I was hoping for external SAS RAID or JBOD support..

[David Nixon]

There is, currently, limited support under
Linux for this HBA.