JBOD SAS adapter for Solaris/Nexenta on Dell PowerEdge 2950?
Given:
- One or more available Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers
- The desire to deploy ZFS iSCSI storage using Nexenta or Solaris
- ZFS uses software RAID
- Dell's PERC 5 RAID controllers do not support JBOD
- Presenting single-disk RAID 0 arrays in lieu of JBOD is not desirable
Question:
- I would like to replace the PERC with a SAS controller that is supported by Solaris and/or Nexenta. Do you have any personal recommendations?
- Would this be compatible with the existing backplane?
- What about external (MD1000) enclosures?
- Have you ever actually tried to do this with a Dell server? Do you have any other thoughts, recommendations, or bits of wisdom from personal experience?
In my experience, for ZFS LSI non-raid cards are the best. I use a Dell SAS6i (LSI 1068E rebadge) for internal drives and LSI SAS3801E (dual 3gbps 4x miniSAS ports) for external drives (MD1000) under Solaris 10 (s10u9) for ZFS at work, while I use the LSI SAS 9200-16e (quad 6gbps 4x miniSAS) at home with Nexenta (NCP3). Nothing but good things to say about LSI cards and support.
We use the LSI 1068 chipset HBA's such as LSI SAS 3081E-R with OpenSolaris. You can also find that chipset OEM'd by Intel and SuperMicro.
We use these internally on our ASUS boxes w/o a backplane. It should work on a backplane, but we just have that feature.
Dell's SAS 6/ir 'budget raid' adapters do JBOD unless the drive is in a RAID array. The cards work relatively well from my experience although I cannot attest to whether they work with Nexenta or Solaris.
See also this answer