Small Sun development lab

[Kate]

I have recently accepted a job that has a development lab with a lot of Sun equipment, fiber infrastructure, and more. Consequently I have worked with neither very much before. Over the last few weeks I have been trying to find the right answer for this situation:

What do you do with several X4540's, several X4270 M2's, a weak copper network (1Gb), Fiber Channel HBAs in everything (but not connected to anything), unused fiber switches, and a huge demand for fast data storage?

There is no room for port bonding due to lack of interfaces on our ethernet switches so obviously something has to be done with this fiber infrastructure that is completely unused (dont ask i have no idea).

Clearly I have much storage available on top of these Sun servers that get to enjoy the greatness of ZFS, but if all I got to serve the data is a single 1 Gb ethernet port- I feel nauseous. I have all my ZFS platforms capable of writing at over 1 GBps, but I can't even wake them up with 1 Gb of network i/o.

I want to utilize this fiber infrastructure. The only thing I have found thus far is the COMMSTAR project. UNFORTUNATELY: This particular organization will NOT budge on moving away from Solaris 10. So I cannot run OpenSolaris. Anyone have ideas or suggestions?

Thanks!

[Ben Rockwood]

Post by Kate
What do you do with several X4540's, several X4270 M2's, a weak copper network (1Gb), Fiber Channel HBAs in everything (but not connected to anything), unused fiber switches, and a huge demand for fast data storage?
There is no room for port bonding due to lack of interfaces on our ethernet switches so obviously something has to be done with this fiber infrastructure that is completely unused (dont ask i have no idea).
Clearly I have much storage available on top of these Sun servers that get to enjoy the greatness of ZFS, but if all I got to serve the data is a single 1 Gb ethernet port- I feel nauseous. I have all my ZFS platforms capable of writing at over 1 GBps, but I can't even wake them up with 1 Gb of network i/o.
I want to utilize this fiber infrastructure. The only thing I have found thus far is the COMMSTAR project. UNFORTUNATELY: This particular organization will NOT budge on moving away from Solaris 10. So I cannot run OpenSolaris. Anyone have ideas or suggestions?

Sounds like you've thought it through pretty well. I'd hammer them for
COMSTAR personally. Remember, COMSTAR is only required on the storage
servers, not the clients, so you wouldn't have to switch to OpenSolaris
everywhere. If your bosses are allergic to OpenSolaris, why not shoot
for Solaris 11 Beta?

One thing that comes to mind as an alternative is to use IPFC
(http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/820-1931/agkbp/index.html).
Its a little ridiculous, frankly, because you would incur all the pain
of a Fibre Channel SAN with all the downsides of IP. It would be a
management PITA, but it would likely work. I've played around with it
for fun but never in production.

Buy your boss lunch and tell him that you want to prepare for the future
while solving a critical need with no capital outlay using S11. :)

benr.