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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.

15 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Here's another way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    1) Buy a lot of fibre
    2) Fly to Folkestone, England
    3) Rent a sailboat
    4) Sail to Calais, France, laying an array of fibre behind you
    5) Congratulation on your Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array.

  2. Ewwwww. by Dr+Tom+Danger · · Score: 4, Funny
    Ug, a Compaq case? I've found there just isn't enough "Compaq sucks" propaganda on the web these days.

    But seriously, I bet if I wired this in my dorm room I could get some mean negative pings in UT '03. Kinda like a 'spider sense' for the pc.

    --

    suck my ping!

  3. 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!
    1. Re:No, I don't want one by smittyoneeach · · Score: 4, Funny

      You raise an excellent QA point.
      Could become some major FUD, though, Elmer.
      You figure that your first outing or two might well have some flaws, and are certainly not ready for enterprise usage.
      So you get the hang of it on some little implementations before you go for a big one.
      Sort of the way you start up a little software test project and make sure you understand all of
      the header, object, and API issues for that shiny new library you just got off of SourceForge
      before you try to integrate something new with what you're _really_ working on.
      As a business strategy, FUD is great. If we can keep people convinced that they _can't_ do it themselves, they're more likely to hire us at phat consulting rates.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    2. Re:No, I don't want one by nolife · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There is always FUD associated with "Enterprise" class hardware and software. Some things really do need to perform at specific level or a baseline to run in this class, others do not but ride the coat tails of others that due for the exact reason you specify -- people do not want to bet their job on it, remember the old saying, you will never get fired for buying IBM.

      At work we decommisioned a large Compaq 2 year old server with a nice raid setup and SAN connectivity running Novell to make room for our MS takeover. The last job this server performed was storage to allow us to boot workstations with a network floppy and create and restore desktop images and for general storage in the IT department. It wasnt to bad but we never really achieved any more then 2-3MBytes/sec when transferring files to and from it. We did not have our new MS server to replace it yet so I took a small footprint Compaq P-III desktop with 512MB ram and loaded RH on it, slapped in an extra 7200rpm Maxtor 160GB IDE drive. Installed Samba, joined it to our W2K domain and it works great. We pull and store multiple images to the thing at roughly 5Mbyte/sec per PC and it has a sustained thoughput of about 10-12Mbyte/sec per HD or per network card (I have two NICs and you can select which one to use from the client boot disk when you connect. It also lets us burn DVD's directly from a Windows workstation at 2.4 speed (3.5Mbytes/sec) which our Novell server could never handle (many buffer underruns or had to transfer image file to the PC first).

      It does not have the redundancy of the old Novell server as I have a no raid setup but I back up the files using rsync to my other Linux machine on a daily basis and we have hundreds of other similar desktops I could grab parts from if needed. That desktop coast us about $600. that server was well over $5000.

      I guess the point is, it does not have to say "Enterprise", server, or cost a lot of money to perform the work you may need.

      The only other small problem is if I get hit by a bus they are screwed as the rest of the department has little interest in the headless Linux thing I have sitting on my desk. I am willing to explain it to anyone but being in a MS driven shop, so far only one person is interested. All they know is it currently works great.

      --
      Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
  4. 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.

  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. =)

    1. Re:Been there, almost done that... by tigress · · Score: 4, Informative

      Uhh, yes we DID get a host adapter for $40. =)

      QLogic 2100 copper, purchased on eBay for $32, shipping was about $8.

      Check it out yourself, there's some on there right now for less than $30.

  6. File Locking by rf0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah this is cool and such like but what if you want to mount it across two machine using two FCA's? You need software that allows file locking (such as SGI's CXFS) and that costs. Mind you if you only wanted it on one machine why not just buy a load of disks because in honesty when are you going to need such high amounts of bandwidth?

    Rus

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
  7. Only external? by larien · · Score: 4, Informative
    Since Fibre Channel is always found in external drive arrays
    Er, no, except perhaps in the Intel world. Sun certainly ships newer servers (280, 480, 880 & 1280) with FC internal disks. Their reason for that (given in their FAQ is that the arbitration for SCSI still takes place at the original 5MB/sec.
    1. Re:Only external? by hbackert · · Score: 4, Informative

      Starting at Ultra320, Quick Arbitration is now available.

      Given that this is cutting edge of parallel SCSI, I can understand Sun to skip anything older. However I yet have to see a significant performance gain from going from U2W (80 MB/s) to FC. Arbitriation might be slower on U2W, but FC contains routing informations in each packet, which parallel SCSI lacks.

      Personally, I am very happy with the good old parallel SCSI. Even cutting edge drives like Cheetah 15k.3 are really fast, even when I cannot push them to their limit.

  8. from the.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...porn storage at the speed of light department

  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. SCSI vs. Fiber Channel by snowtigger · · Score: 5, Informative

    Where I used to work, we had a few Sun servers with FC disk arrays.

    Here's the Sun engineer's explanation of why FC is so interesting for servers:

    1) The FC protocol has a 100MByte/s dedicated bandwidth to data. The communication between disks etc. will not interfer with this bandwidth.

    2) Modern SCSI has two modes: one for data (burst mode) and one communication mode. The communication mode is a lot slower (first scsi standard) in order to remain compatible with older disks. This means that scsi is a lot more advantageous to users reading large files than small files.

    This is where FC becomes interesting: If you have a striped disk array, you will read many small segments from different disks instead of large segments from single disks. In this special case, FC is faster than SCSI, even though it is "slower" by looking at the burst rates in the specs.