Fibre Channel and SAS

[Doug183]

Ok, so this question might be silly.

So I am trying to build an NAS/SAN with a server computer and a 12 bay expansion chassis. The chassis is SAS so I will need an SAS HBA pci card (JBOD) to connect the server to it.

My question is can I use Fibre Channel to connect the client computers to the server.

1) 2gb Fibre cards are about $150 used on ebay. If I buy 4 of them and drop each one into a client computer and one into the server, and hook them all up to a switch... will this work? Will FreeNAS let me share the SAS drives over the Fibre Network? I mean it will let me do it with 1gb & 10gb ethernet?

2) Is this a decent way to get better transfer speeds then 1gb ethernet.

3) Am I missing something with 10gb ethernet? It seems awfully expensive, even used PCIe cards on e-bay are 300+ each.

Thanks for any help
Doug

 

[RvdKraats]

Hi Doug,

i was wondering this myself too. AFAIK FreeBSD *can* support FC cards, and connect some LUNs/extends/zvols to it, but it would require some manual tinkering. I'm not sure how that works under FreeBSD, however (i managed to do this with Openfiler). I connected my Openfiler to my IBM POWER4 through a Brocade 2GB switch, and that works just fine, my IBM sees another hdisk :)

Now, if only i could find out how to do this with FreeNAS...

 

[joeschmuck]

Ok, so this question might be silly.

So I am trying to build an NAS/SAN with a server computer and a 12 bay expansion chassis. The chassis is SAS so I will need an SAS HBA pci card (JBOD) to connect the server to it.

My question is can I use Fibre Channel to connect the client computers to the server.

1) 2gb Fibre cards are about $150 used on ebay. If I buy 4 of them and drop each one into a client computer and one into the server, and hook them all up to a switch... will this work? Will FreeNAS let me share the SAS drives over the Fibre Network? I mean it will let me do it with 1gb & 10gb ethernet?

2) Is this a decent way to get better transfer speeds then 1gb ethernet.

3) Am I missing something with 10gb ethernet? It seems awfully expensive, even used PCIe cards on e-bay are 300+ each.

Thanks for any help
Doug

http://www.google.com/products/cata...a=X&ei=jfJcUPmJO4nj0gGcoYCgCg&ved=0CHsQ8wIwAg

Update: Yes, dropping a single card into each computer and the NAS, hooked up with a proper switch will increase your speed if you are already maxing out your 1gb port like I am.

Also, look at this (up top), not sure if you could use this or not but it's the least expensive 10gb ethernet port I've found.

To get faster than a single port you need to bind the channels together and FreeNAS must support binding which I doubt it does, but I could be wrong. Your max throughput from one computer to the NAS will be the maximum speed of a single connection, not the combined total, even if you ran 2 ports to the computer and 2 ports to the NAS, they are not binded together.

I looked into 10gb ethernet and it's expensive, too much for me. I would be happy if I could bind two 100mb ports together between my computer and the NAS so if you find that answer, I'd love to hear it so I can do it too.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

FreeNAS does support different bonding methods, your switch would need to support them too for most cases as well