Is it possible to use SAS HBAs from Oracle ZFS appliance in other servers?

[Ninevah]

My company is getting rid of an Oracle ZFS appliance (labels on it say ZS4-4). The head units have several SAS3 quad-port controllers (Adaptec and Microsemi from the looks of it) on them. I tried putting those into some Dell servers here and cabling those up to some of the ZFS drive shelves, but it seems like they're not functioning. There doesn't seem to be anything loading during the POST process related to them and if I boot to something like shredos to wipe the drives in the shelves, it reports no drives found. Does anyone know if Oracle somehow makes these sorts of components unusable in non-Oracle servers? And if there's some way to get around that? Or is it possible I'm just missing something to get these working?

 

[Arwen]

If you can list the exact Sun part numbers, I can look up the original vendor & potentially chip model.

But, if they are Adaptec or Microsemi, they would generally not be usable with TrueNAS.

 

[Ninevah]

The Oracle PN for the board that has a Microsemi logo on it is 7310615
The Oracle PN for the board that has an Adaptec logo on it is 7067091

 

[jgreco]

These are not acceptable for TrueNAS. Please see the following article.

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

See especially points 2), 4), and 4a). Your PMC/MicroSemi/Adaptec stuff is easily replaced by well-supported LSI HBA's and possibly SAS expanders to make up for the ports lost.