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Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array

Posted by timothy on from the woodscrews dept.

skarphedin writes "There's an interesting story here on a do-it-yourself fibre channel array. These guys make one for under $250 and it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases." You know you want one.

17 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Store already slashdotted by tliet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It seems the links to the store selling the goodies is already slashdotted. The $40 a piece FC hostbus adapter page now shows $800 adapters, or a 100 pack for just over $60000. Beowulf anyone?

    1. Re:Store already slashdotted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Are those drives really that worthless? I mean look at this
      http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte m&item =3406233779&category=11160

      Seems like they should cost much more. A small business say a video shop could build one hell of a server with those. I guess its just surprising that they don't cost a lot more than some of the IDE drives I see there. Do you think there just not reliable anymore?

  2. No, I don't want one by haggar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have used FC tech for several years. It's amazing technology, but performance is not it's main advantage. It's advantage is the possibility of stacking up incredible amounts of storage, with rendundant paths, at up to 100 m from the attachment point (one of the servers). This kind of environment is also very mindful of quality, and a self-made solution is not acceptable. Would you stack dozens of these self-made boxes and bet your career that they'll not fail. I know I wouldn't.

    On the other hand, if I just want performance, I will do better with SCSI, and even save some money.

    In this respect, I don't quite see what kind of niche would the solution in the article cover.

    --
    Sigged!
  3. I dont quite get it by watzinaneihm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Fibre chanels I thought were used because
    1) Huge expansivity .
    2) Faster speeds, esp. over LAN (Storage area networks)
    Why would one want to use it in a home setup?
    You probably are not going to buy more than 3 or 4 Harddisks. I say if you want speed use more RAM(*though you wont get much for $250 * results might vary). If you want expansivity(not too much) and relatively fast (depends on a lot of stuff) access speeds and standards based setup, may I suggest iSCSI

    --
    .ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
    1. Re:I dont quite get it by tigress · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why would one want to use it in a home setup?

      For the fun of doing it, for one thing. For instance, I have Token Ring, ATM and serial equipment in my home LAN. Why, when there is FE or even GigE? Because it's fun to play around with, and I learn a lot as well.

      Second, you might get pretty darn good performance out of a relatively cheap setup. Modern ATA-drives are pretty fast, but the problem is, there's just a single spindle. Random access will kill your drive. A home-built FC array for the price of an ATA-drive will get you perhaps five to ten separate drives. Mostly, these drives will be 10k drives as well (Almost all ATA-drives are 7.2k or less). The slightly higher rotation speed combined with the fact that you've got a large amount of individual spindles gives you much better random access. Also, remember that ATA usually is a huge CPU hog, which adds to the performance bottleneck.

    2. Re:I dont quite get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      There still are limits to the number of devices that can be attach at the OS level. Last time I checked, HPUX's limit was about 124 devices and Sun's limit was 256. Under 11.11, HP may have bumped that up a bit.

      And what good is mutliple fibre channels without EMC PowerPath for bandwidth balancing and failover?

  4. How long you think... by red5 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How long do you think till the mac-heads credit apple with bring down the price of FC by including it in the X-raid? Just like they credited apple with bring down the price on SCSI, USB, etc.

    --
    I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
    1. Re:How long you think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I think the possibility of getting such cheap FC solution really goes to show how utterly overpriced apple is. Remember when the xserve raid came out, and the apple naysayers were all "You can't build something equivalent from standard parts for the price". That was just over a month ago. In one month, hobbyists have created a working solution that does what apple's does for nearly a tenth the cost. You can't argue with fast hard facts.

  5. Been there, almost done that... by tigress · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We had great plans for building an FC array up until a while ago. For those who think FC is too expensive, take a look at this:

    180GB ATA drive: $200

    Qlogic FC host adapter: $40
    10 18GB 10k drives (eBay): $99
    10 T-cards: $50
    UTP-cable: $20
    --------------
    Total: $209

    Of course, there's the cost of running the array as well, which is the reason we never finished our project (We did get the hostadapter and built a couple of T-cards though). We calculated that our FC array would cost us an additional $2-300 in electricity every year. After getting hit with a $500 surprise electricity bill for our current equipment, we simply decided it wasn't worth it and got another IDE drive instead. Still, an interresting project. =)

  6. SCA40 Backplanes by Detritus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The drive mounting and enclosure was a bit of a kludge. Are there any reasonably priced boxes that you can install the drives in, with the correct mounting hardware and backplane?

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  7. Why shouldn't it? by shoppa · · Score: 3, Interesting
    it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases

    Why should this be surprising? FC drives are in every single case SCSI drives with a different, more expensive, interface. Although they tend to be cheaper on the surplus market, which I think is the *real* point.

  8. a Hoax story by stock · · Score: 3, Interesting
    When i follow the links for the prices of his used components i get the following :
    • 18.4GB Fibre Channel 3.5LP 10K RPM 25.4MM (Hitachi) - (DK32CJ18FC) $119.00
    • QLA2100/66 64bit PCI FC Host Adpt COPP w/Cab (Qlogic) - (QLA210066) $858.20
    So where did he get those goodies? Ohh! he was just good buddies with a ex- Enterprise storage Admin?

    Robert

  9. What a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why put all of 2 disks into an ugly assed old compaq case with those shady adapters when you can go buy a used 11,14 or 22 disk fibre-channel array with redundant power and dual loops made by a certain manufacturer (hey I ain't givin up all my secrets) for well less than $500 empty and around $650 with ~180GB 10K disks in it?! And yes of course they do make FC cards with internal adapters on them too. Here's a hint: SENA. As for FC not having performance, all I can say is 'HUH?!' I'll take a single 1gbps loop over scsi320 parallel or whatever they're calling it any day. Beyond my own benchmarking FC devices, if SCSI were better/faster don't you think people like EMC, HDS and Compaq (believe it or not Compaq makes some pretty kickin arrays) would still use SCSI back ends or even front ends on their storage products? For years EMC has been slammed about using SCSI back ends in their arrays and finally have FC throughout the machines. FC is saweeet and it runs SCSI above the FC layer as well. It can also run other protocols like IP but I've yet to see that implemented well.

  10. Gee... by Lysol · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anyone looked at the prices from the story? I could not find a $25 FC drive anywhere. Cheapest was $120. So, yah, $240 for 2 drives, that kinda blows the under $250 out of the water.

    Anyway, being a 'mac head' and a 'linux head' and a 'computer head' in general, I don't necessairly get the orig posters issue. Apple does a lot of cool things. And some things just happen to hit the Mac market before the PC market. Big deal. Why not bitch about Billy G. then?

    My work has been setting up a FCA for the past three weeks using Linux and there have been some major problems. They have a fat array with 32 15k rpm U320 drives hooked up to a IBM x440 via 4 HBAs. The interesting thing is that no distro they've tried can transfer faster than Windoze due to Linux kernel and driver issues. I was a little shoked. The x440 has 8 Xeons w/hyperthreading. The more cpus that are enabled, the more the performance degrades. The sysadmin says he thinks it has something to do with single-threaded io calls in all Linux kernels - the more cpus try to access io, the more threads that get blocked. Me and the other sysadmin - Gentoo 'heads' - start scratching our heads wondering what all the Linux 'Enterprise' stuff is that everyone is talking about. And yes, these components were all given the 'good to go' stamp by all their manufacturers. Since the prob is with the kernel itself, this is kinda major.

    So, these things are cool, but there are definitely reasons for and against having them. I doubt you could build anything useful for under $400-$500 and they're really only going to shine in a server or workstation environment whith sustained io. It's nice to have these things as proof of concept at home (hell, I have all kinds of weird servers and drives and such), but when you start talking about a production environment in the enterprise, it takes on a whole new ball of wax.

    I still think the XServe is interesting, however, I'm not too thrilled about ATA drives. Guess that was for cost tho. Go mac heads!

  11. Nice But ...... by Quietlife2k · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone seen ide to fibre channel convertors ? Before you flame - They DO exist this product has them in it see here :- http://www.axus.com.tw/br1200fc.htm Anyone seen single drive versions of this ?

  12. I built a FC array last year... by nuxx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I made a Fibre Channel array like this last year. The only difference being that I used a Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 (eBay for $200), a 256MB Crucial DIMM for cache, and four Seagate ST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM disks.

    My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.

    There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.

  13. From the Trenches by LordMyren · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Having built my own fiber channel backplanes based of a previously slashdot mentioned cinonic backplane, I agree, there are difficulties in setting up a fibre channel array. I got a db9-db9 cable and a hssdc-hssdc cable orgiinally, and ended up trying to solder them together. I'd never tried soldering shields together, and presumed it would take a while, but I kinda found out its pretty much impossible. So I just pulled on over the other and wire wrapped the hell out of it. I suspect its because of the cabling, but my fibre setup is fairly intollerant to electrical fields. I have to place the drives and cabling as far away from everything; cat 5, computer systems, et al. Kinda not pretty. Before proper positioning, you'd get occasional sometimes fatal SCSI errors. Kernel panics were driving me nuts. I realized the drive was between a switch and a computer, so I spent a while and figured out the path of least interference. Now I can run bonnie++ on my 5 disc soft-raid 5 JBOD for a week straight. And fry eggs as the same time! And no more kernel panics. Thats always a plus. Its a pain, but in the proper linux motto, once you can get it running, you can bet its not gonna stop.