Oracle Hardware build

[ralazir]

Greetings, this is my first post and I am happy to fix/change/learn.

I work at a smallish state government agency, always running in a budget crunch. We bought, at fire-sale prices, some Oracle systems from another state agency, flotsam from a failed project:
Oracle ZS3-2 controllers (2)
Oracle DE24 shelves (4 shelves, approximately 640 TiB raw storage, spinning rust)

Actually we have two of these. Surprisingly, we can't afford support from Oracle (~40K/hyear), so I am attempting to see how else the hardware can be used. Naturally, I thought of FreeNAS!

I have everything cabled up and operating, with FreeNAS-11.2-RELEASE-U1. So basic operation is fine. My concerns are:
1.) I don't think I can use two controller heads as Oracle had designed the system as I assume that would be proprietary to them. Seems like a shame but I think I will split the two heads with 2 shelves each on a single head.
2.) "Gotchas" -- Is anyone familiar with these systems, or generally can suggest any "gotchas" for these in a second tier production environment?

Here is a link to the docs: Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-ES service manual

Thanks for taking a look,
Ralazir

 

[Arwen]

The few Sun Microsystems, (before Oracle bought Sun), x86/x64 servers I worked with, were rock solid x86/x64 data center grade servers.

But, as usual, if you don't have hardware support, then parts replacement is haphazad, and potentially costly.

 

[HoneyBadger]

1. There's no HA features in FreeNAS - that's limited to the TrueNAS branch which can't just be dropped onto any server. You can roll your own solution if desired, but you'd better be very comfortable with ZFS and clustering services if you're going to do this in a commercial environment - and I'd recommend you build it on a vanilla FreeBSD/Linux base rather than trying to armbar FreeNAS into doing something it doesn't want to.

2. As Arwen mentions, the lack of parts availability may be a concern; there were a lot of consumer-off-the-shelf parts in those units, so you may be able to scrape parts from resellers or liquidators. There wasn't a lot of firmware lockout to enforce "thou shalt only use Oracle-branded parts" that I can remember though, so swapping in a feature-equivalent part with FreeBSD driver support should be possible.