Sun x4540, Thumper, as FC Target?
By Bob Plankers on Sep 9, 2008 in Featured, System Administration
Hey, is anyone out there using a Sun x4540 (aka Thumper) as a fibre channel target on their SAN?
The COMSTAR project that’s part of OpenSolaris appears to be able to make a volume available over the SAN. I’m very interested in that, but I’d like to know what other people think about it, especially in terms of stability & performance[0], before I go trying anything.
If you have any thoughts could you leave me a comment?
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[0] Yes, I know it’s SATA, but for what I want to do, and across 48 drives, it’ll probably be fine. Plus they come with a god-awful amount of RAM. Go caching go!
1 Comment(s)
By Fabio Rapposelli on Sep 16, 2008 | Reply
It’s a very interesting piece of software, I’m in the middle of a POC for a customer using the latest SNV build on a X4500.
We’re currently stressing the new CIFS stack and is pretty damn good, I just briefly tried the FC target feature of COMSTAR, it’s a bit rough on the edges but performance-wise is excellent.
You should try to get one of those babies under a try&buy agreement (usually 60 days) and do some tests yourself, remember that only 4G qlogic cards are supported with the QLT driver.
HTH,
Fabio