On 08/16/2013 07:51 PM, Tony Schreiner wrote:
I am wondering if any one knows of a way to manage Xyratex disk shelves from CentOS (in particular CentOS 4).
More details: Some years ago I installed a NAS unit from Exanet which consists of 2 rebadged IBM x3650 head nodes and a couple of Xyratex disk shelves with a total of 96 TB of raw disk, connected by fibre channel. The operating system is based on CentOS 4.4, but is modified, and runs a proprietary file system. It has pretty good performance and I'm happy with it.
You may know that the company went bust some years ago, so I have been running this system unsupported. I am loath to give up the disk space though.
The two things I worry about are, the fibre channel connection and the external disk trays. Unfortunately, what I know about fibre channel is very little. They are emulex HBAs, and I guess there used to software called lputil, but this is no longer available at the Emulex site. It has been replaced by something called HBAnywhere, but I have not succeeded in building that on CentOS 4. Uprading the OS is out of the question I would think while maintaining the file system capability.
And the other question is how to manage the LUNs on the Xyratex's.
I'd be grateful for any info anyone has on either.
Tony Schreiner
Have you tried to locate ex employees of that Company? Maybe you could hire some developer from that Company to help you out?