Supermicro chassis JBOD questions.

[soulburn]

I am thinking I can go with a Supermicro 847 JBOD for a use in my homelab, non production environment, so I can build my 36x spindle disk array for media storage and also have enough room for 4x SSD's for an iSCSI VM datastore and 2x SSD's for ZIL and 1x SSD for L2ARC and am looking at the following:

847E16-R1K28JBOD
847E26-R1K28JBOD

1. I have been mainly looking at the E16 chassis, but out of curiosity, can you use SATA drives in the E26 variant chassis backplanes? These are the ones that have the dual expanders with failover capabilities.
2. Would I be able to just use my 9211-8i in another server along with an internal 8087 cable plugged into the back of this single 8087 to 8088 PCI bracket adapter and this cable to connect the JBOD to my other server?
3. If so, will one 8088 cable have enough bandwidth to support 36x SATA HDDs and 7x SSDs at their full speed, or do I need something else or multiple 8088 cables as to utilize the full potential of the configuration I've listed above, such as this dual 8088 to 8087 adapter to plug two 8088 cables into the JBOD with the goal being increasing bandwidth?
4. Does the Supermicro 847 JBOD cases come with all the internal cables needed to connect the 24 and 21 port backplanes to the 4x 8088 connectors on the back of the chassis?
5. I notice the back of the 847 JBOD has 4 SFF-8088 ports, and I'm just trying to figure out, can I use one connector or do I need more to connect the JBOD to a single host server in the optimal way?
6. If I'll only need to use one 8088 connector in my application, under what condition would you use more than one 8088 connector?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Ericloewe]

• I have been mainly looking at the E16 chassis, but out of curiosity, can you use SATA drives in the E26 variant chassis backplanes? These are the ones that have the dual expanders with failover capabilities.

I believe it should work if you only use one expander. Not sure though.

Would I be able to just use my 9211-8i in another server along with an internal 8087 cable plugged into the back of this single 8087 to 8088 PCI bracket adapter and this cable to connect the JBOD to my other server?

Nominally, yes. Pay attention to maximum SAS cable length. (5m, I think - may be two or three meters...). Typical SAS expander caveats apply, too.

If so, will one 8088 cable have enough bandwidth to support 36x SATA HDDs and 7x SSDs at their full speed, or do I need something else or multiple 8088 cables as to utilize the full potential of the configuration I've listed above, such as this dual 8088 to 8087 adapter to plug two 8088 cables into the JBOD with the goal being increasing bandwidth?

No. An SFF-8088/8087 cable carries four SAS2 channels @ 6Gb/s each. Not too bad for the drives, but the SSDs will suffer.

Options: More HBAs with smaller expanders and dual cable (8 channels) links between HBAs and expanders, just more HBAs to offload the expanders...

• If I'll only need to use one 8088 connector in my application, under what condition would you use more than one 8088 connector?

Extra bandwidth or SAS multipathing.

 

[soulburn]

Perfect, thanks for your help!

Regarding this comment:

No. An SFF-8088/8087 cable carries four SAS2 channels @ 6Gb/s each. Not too bad for the drives, but the SSDs will suffer.

Options: More HBAs with smaller expanders and dual cable (8 channels) links between HBAs and expanders, just more HBAs to offload the expanders...

I assume I can just simply use both 8087 ports on the 9211-8i and that will give me the bandwidth to fully utilize the performance of the SSDs, correct?

 

[Ericloewe]

Perfect, thanks for your help!

Regarding this comment:


I assume I can just simply use both 8087 ports on the 9211-8i and that will give me the bandwidth to fully utilize the performance of the SSDs, correct?

Theoretically, it's that easy. However, some people have reported some difficulty with such setups. I'd recommend ensuring that the expander/backplane has the latest firmware.