On 12/12/10 08:56, John R Pierce wrote: > >> IBM sells some nice one rack units as well. > > speaking of. anyone have any experience with the IBM DS3500 storage? > > I've been considering the DS3500 for my dev lab storage. These come > 24x2.5" (or 12x3.5") SAS 2U boxes with redundant storage controllers > that have 2x2 SAS host ports and either 2x4 gigE iscsi or 2x4gb FC > ports. you get to pay extra for more host partitions and stuff. they > are basically rebranded LSI/Engenio 2600 and come in both 12x3.5" or > 24x2.5" 2U SAS chassis... there's also SAS expansion ports you can add > several additional storage bays to. > > I have zero (0) experience with IBM branded storage. I do have a IBM > Bladecenter and Power 520 AIX server in my lab, so I'm not all together > unfamiliar with IBM. I don't know about the DS3500, but I'm using a DS3200 with SAS HBA interface. It the moment it's used by a Fedora 12 box (I'm freezing on this release and awaits for C6 to appear), and it works just flawlessly. Nice, quite intuitive and informative admin interface which is accessible directly via TCP/IP to the storage unit (out-of-band) or using the SAS interface directly (in-band). The only thing to pick on the admin interface is that it's Java and I had to tweak the start script a little bit to make it run as a non-root user via a VPN connection. Another thing is that an instance of the admin interface must be running for automated e-mail alerts if something happens. Except of that, I'm very happy with it! The unit have 12 slots for disks and it is possible to connect more units together. Its also one available slot for another controller, so that two servers may use it via separate physical channels. It also have two power supplies as standard and it even complains badly if one of them is not connected. The host adapter is the "IBM 3Gb SAS HBA Controller v2", which uses the mptsas (Fusion-MPT SAS) driver, so Linux support is present. I don't know, but I would even expect this driver to be recent enough in RHEL5/C5 as well. I do not have any particular experience with other storage brands and I chose this one due to my very good experience with IBM servers and their Linux support. And I would definitely go out and by another IBM storage again if I needed to. kind regards, David Sommerseth