re-purposing Tegile T3100-B2 storage array ??

[DonM]

We have 3 of these commercial ZFS storage appliances. For those unfamiliar with this box - it's built of standard (3-4 yrs. old) Supermicro parts. The controller box is a 3U twin configuration with 2x X9DBS-F nodes in a 6038R style chassis w/16 3.5" disk slots, jbod expansion via SAS3.
It's running their brand of Solaris, with some proprietary mods to zfs. It will supposedly complete a controller failover and zpool re-import in 2-4 seconds.

Hypothetically speaking - has anyone ever contemplated replacing the OS on these controllers with Freenas (or Truenas, if IX might condone it) ??

thanks,
don m.

 

[Chris Moore]

Hypothetically speaking - has anyone ever contemplated replacing the OS on these controllers with Freenas (or Truenas, if IX might condone it) ??

FreeNAS doesn't have the software in it for controller fail-over. TrueNAS does, but you would need to call iXsystems and discuss with them whether or not they would even consider putting their software on some hardware they have not vetted. That is the thing with TrueNAS, they develop the particulars of the advanced features to work with the specific hardware they use. They have a dual-head unit that supports hot fail-over. I have seen it demonstrated. It works great. It might even work on the hardware you have, but it might not because we don't know the details of what is in those boxes.

Here is a demo video that someone put on YouTube with one of the TrueNAS units:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG_NvKuh530

You should be able to get FreeNAS working on a single node