Alternate storage options for rackmount?

[blitzy]

Hi Guys,

Recently here at work we got a new rackmount server (I can't find the model number because one of the IT contractors has taken the manual away, its SuperMicro brand, dual Xeon), I'm not sure if it's a 1U or 2U but I guess that isnt too important. There is nobody here with expertise in this type of hardware, but we will be using it to host our VMware Server setup.

The problem is that it has a SCSI backplane, and SCSI drives are stupidly expensive. Now they should have researched this more carefully and got a server with a SATA backplane which would accept much cheaper drives.

My question is does anyone have any suggestions for a cheap way to shoehorn SATA drives into this server? Is it possible using some kind of SATA addin card or some kind of attached storage that would enable it to accept SATA disks?

Currently we are looking into the cost of replacing the backplane, I'm not sure if there are any other logical avenues we should be taking. Any ideas?

[just brew it!]

Well first off, if you're going to be hosting a lot of VMs on this thing you probably should consider shelling out the dough for the SCSI drives. Enterprise-class SCSI drives are optimized for server workloads; stepping down to SATA drives could cause the disk(s) to become a major performance bottleneck.

That said, what kind of SCSI is it -- parallel or SAS? If it is SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), you may be able to use SATA drives with the existing backplane. (SAS is a superset of SATA with physically compatible connectors, so SATA drives should theoretically work... SAS controllers are supposed to be able to recognize and deal with SATA drives.)

[blitzy]

that's a valid consideration, I should have provided more detail on what we are using the server for though.

We will be using it to host VMWare ESX Server (this might have been renamed in the newer version), which will be used as a software testing environment, mainly to deploy machines to test in different OS/software configurations. We won't be using the VMWare setup to virtualise all of our users or anything like that. It's just a testing environment that we use to install and test our software on.

My Job is software testing and I'll be the main person making use of the VMWare server (occasionally do the odd support type things here also), so for me the performance isn't a huge issue. I think the disk speed would mainly affect the deployment / cloning of machines and powering them up, moreso than how useable they are. That's just my guess, but I can live with it taking a while to deploy machines as long as theyre usable when I am testing the software. I think once the images are loaded they get cached to memory so performance might be OK with SATA.

Also, we got quoted about $325 for a Seagate Cheetah 300GB 15k SCSI 80-pin interface disk. I dont have the server or manual or model number here so I can't check that right now. But possibly if they are quoting us this disk it may eliminate the possibility that it is SAS? I'm guessing that the thing is SCSI only, but I dont have the details here to confirm that yet.

[drsauced]

Nope, 80-pin pretty much says that the drives you have are good old fashioned parallel SCSI, in this case 80-pin SCA connectors (both power and data, hotpluggable). You could just pull a drive and look at the back of it. If it looks like SATA, then it's SAS. If it's not, then it's plain parallel SCSI.

That's enough FLA's and TLA's though.