Giving all front drives to one half of a Fat Twin

[Robert Smith]

Edit: Sorry the question is about 2U Twin, not 4U FatTwin.

Does anybody have experience with Supermicro 2U Twin servers? Two side-by side nodes in a 2U chasee, sharing redundant power supplies.

In the 3.5” hot-swap drive configuration, 2U Twins have six drives attached to one node and six to the other. How easy would it be to connect all twelve of the drives to a single node for FreeNAS use (with an extra controller, most likely)? It is possible in theory; but in practice, would there be enough room for all the data cabling and rerouting power for the other half of the backplanes?

Basically, I want one node to be the FreeNAS storage server, and the other node will be a [non ESXi] virtualization server using the storage server. As such, I want to give all the front drive slots to FreeNAS. I would probably connect the two nodes with a crossover cable between two 10 Gigabit network interfaces.

 

[maglin]

Yes. Just attach the second backplane to the FreeNAS HBA. Shouldn't need another HBA as you should have two ports to use. Just use a switch with two 10G ports. That will help out everything attached to the storage appliance.

You shouldn't have any power issues as the backplanes will already be attached to the PSUs.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Robert Smith]

I appreciate the quick reply.

If I power down the other node, would not that cut off half of the drives (if power is not rerouted)? Or all drives are always powered on these systems regardless of the nodes power state?

Why do I need a switch to connect the two nodes together; could not I just use a crossover cable for the storage network?

Any practical experience, like what do I need: longer cables, is there plenty of room for cable management, etc.?

Thank you.

 

[Speedemon68]

Robert,
I think that you are right and would need to change the power source to the storage side. I would contact the case vendor, I thought about buying a few of those cases for different projects but its never worked out.
RC