SanMP, FCP5 and a whole lot of headache

[Francois Stark]

Great – I’ll get a quote from our ADTX supplier.

Thanks
F

[Bart Harrison]

By-the-way Apple just anounced the new PowerMacs. All the slots are PCIe and definitely not compatible with PCI-X cards. Here we go again !!!

Bart

– – – – – – – – – – – – –
Bart Harrison
MPA – The HD Suite

America’s VAR
TurnKey Editing Systems, Storage Area Networks
HD Consulting, Production & Post, Exhibition & Distribution
http://www.hdsuite.com
954-894-1221

[Christopher Tay]

Tell me about it Bart…how about those using SCSI drives ?

Any PCIe SCSI HBA you can think of ?

I wonder if Astera is going to have a PCIe version.

-chrispy

[Francois Stark]

Hi Bart

It looks like I will have to replace 6 Apple fibre cards with Astera cards. Can you tell me about the LU mapping on the Asera cards for Tiger? The replies I got from ADTX said I should enable all LU’s on all ports for Tiger (when using the Apple HBA’s), and that will not work with our current setup.

Thanks
Francois

[Bart Harrison]

I only have personal experience with two configurations. Dual controller L with the Astera Rhino card and single controller L with the Atto Celerity card. At our HD Suite we’re running two 15 drive single controller L’s, one on each channel of the Celerity card. We’re seeing throughput of 370MB/s plus.

Bart

– – – – – – – – – – – – –
Bart Harrison
MPA – The HD Suite

America’s VAR
TurnKey Editing Systems, Storage Area Networks
HD Consulting, Production & Post, Exhibition & Distribution
http://www.hdsuite.com
954-894-1221

[Christopher Tay]

Francois,

According to ADTX the ATTO Celerity and Astera FC HBA behaves the same in Tiger where you can map out the LUNs they way you are doing now. Using the Apple FC HBA you would need to make all LUNs visible but that would mess up your mapping.

What I noticed with the Apple FC HBA on Tiger is that if you say have two LUNs, one for the primary controller and one for the secondary, if you enable all LUNs in the mapping, it actually only show up 2 LUNs in Apple Disk Utility but if you go into the Systems Profiler–>Fibre Channel, each Apple FC HBA port actually sees 2 LUNs so if you’re in Panther, you would see 4 LUNs in the Disk Utility. I have yet to figure which LUN correspond to which Apple FC HBA port as the last time I did the test my LUNs had the same size which makes it difficult to nail down.

The other issue is that Astera won’t have a PCIe HBA anytime soon so moving to the new G5 we only have options from Apple or ATTO, with ATTO only offering 4Gbit PCIe FC HBA. Apple’s new PCIe FC HBA is still 2Gbit.

And Bart, I got the same 370MB/sec or so throughput as well when I striped across both ADTX controllers and I did this on a WinXP machine. I use ATTO Bench32 to do the benchmark and I was able to playback a 2K 10bit log sequence smoothly.

-chrispy

[Francois Stark]

[chrispy] “I have yet to figure which LUN correspond to which Apple FC HBA port as the last time I did the test my LUNs had the same size which makes it difficult to nail down.”

I had the same problem on my first attempt at LU mapping. Currently I have all different sizes, with only corresponding LU’s (to be striped) being the same size.

Thanks for the info. It corresponds to what I’ve seen on the Apple HBA’s in Tiger.

Now I have the info to attempt the tiger migration. This will have to wait until after one of our larger projects finish on Nov 9.

Regards
Francois