SAN Question - PowerVault 660F

[halewoodj]

Hi All,

A bit of a daft question here, but I just wanted to know what people think about this one.

I recently aquired three Dell PowerEdge 6450 servers, and a PowerVault 660F disk array (among other things). The servers have QLogic FibreChannel cards in (64-bit PCI).

The servers are past it - simple as that. But as for the disk pack, well, whilst its not the fastest in the world, it does have all the trimmings in there (so a good amount of redundancy), and I can get just shy of 1TB worth of disks for it for £200 or so. Besides, with what Ill be using the stuff for, 2Gbps FC is going to offer more than enough speed.

As such, I was wondering if there would be any issues with using these FC cards and the disk array in other servers, for example a HP/Compaq Proliant machine.

The 660F would likely end up connected to a pair of Proliant boxes (DL385's), with a pair of PowerVault 51F FC switches in between.

My main reason for asking is because aside from using FC gear at work (where its all the same vendor, etc) Ive never really touched it, and the manuals for the kit Ive got here provide a very narrow list of compatible Dell hardware (no surprises there).

Any ideas and comments much appreciated.

Thanks,

Jon

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

qlogic hba's are very commonly used, and can be put into all server types ( if the bus type matches of course ( pci-x, pci-e,...). With regards to the disk array, you will need to export the luns to the new servers (if you move the hba's, the wwpn's will remain the same normally, so no work there then ), only thing that will happen , is your OS that will be putting a new signature on the disks I guess.

rgds,

R.

NetApp Certified NCDA/NCIE-SAN

 

[halewoodj]

Hi,

Thanks for the info. To be honest, Id not be too fussed about moving the OS installs that are on there at present over. Id be looking at starting fresh and using the 660F as a storage device for a pair of VMWare ESXi servers.

Good to know that the hardware should be compatible though.

Thanks again,

Jon