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I've to an EMC AX150 SAN, with two FC controllers in it. And no existing FC infrastructure. Since the controller cards seem to be modular (you can get 1 or 2 of them), is it possible to obtain iSCSI cards and replace the FC ones in that SAN to make it usable with iSCSI?

If not, can you get a switch that can connect to the SAN via FC, and then have client servers (ESXi 4.1) connecting with ethernet? Can I use something like FCoE?

I wasn't involved in the purchase of this SAN (it's also missing the UPS, which means it needs bodging to get write caching enabled), I'm just trying to see if we can use it at all. FC cards aren't cheap (most of the 2G ones I've seen are PCI-X, which our servers don't have, and the PCI-E ones seem to be £600+.

Thanks,

~Dentrasi

Dentrasi
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1 Answers1

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The AX150 comes in FC or iSCSI versions, although they are very similar designs the differences are significant and converting from one to another would involve replacing the main systemboard/controller. Although technically possible EMC may not offer this path (you'll have to call them) and if they do it is likely to be quite expensive. Consider however that the FC version has far better performance as its ports are 4Gbps as opposed to 1Gbps.

One option you could consider is to use Microsoft Storage Server 2008R2 on a dedicated FC-attached server to act as a gateway, this would only cost the price of the server, an FC HBA and the OS, just wanted you to consider that.

Chopper3
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