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How To Build A High Performance Fibre Channel/iSCSI SAN using an HP DL380 G5 Server

In this white paper, we will configure a high-performance Fibre Channel SAN using an HP DL380 G5 server. The objective is to create a scalable appliance with at least 3TB usable high-performance storage. The configuration should allow room for growth in capacity and/or features.

CONFIGURING THE HARDWARE

The following server was configured using HP's online store. Date of this configuration: February 24, 2008.

We select an HP ProLiant DL380 G5 with a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM. The RAM will be employed as storage processor cache.

We load all 8 of the internal SFF disk slots with SAS drives. We configure a P800 RAID controller and attach the internal drives to its internal connectors. We'll build a RAID 1 set with the first two 72GB disks and create a 12GB boot/system soft partition for the OS. We can use the rest of the space for any purpose... file shares (NAS storage) or provisioned as SAN storage. We choose 146GB 10K drives to fill the remaining 6 slots. We can create RAID groups as we like and use the resulting logical volumes in Thin Provisioned storage pools.

The P800 RAID controller can attach up to 4 external MSA shelves to its two external connectors. This controller and the MSA product line give us a great deal of latitude in configuring for capacity (750GB 7200 RPM SATA in RAID 5) and performance (15K RPM SAS, RAID 10).

For this example, we attach an MSA60 shelf fully populated with 300GB 15K SAS drives. While we can configure the drives in any combination of RAID we choose, going with RAID-5 and allowing for a hot spare will yield approximately 3.7TB of usable SAN storage between the MSA60 JBOD and the server's internal drives.

The HP FCA2214DC is a dual port Fibre Channel card which we will use in "target" mode to convert the server into a SAN. Your application servers will access their disks over these two Fibre Channel ports.

This ProLiant model also features two 1Gb Ethernet ports, which we will be able to use as iSCSI targets. Our SAN will offer both native Fibre Channel (performance) and native iSCSI (economy) connections.

It is worth noting that the Broadcom NICs typically used with the DL series can be teamed; our iSCSI target drivers will attach to IP stacks, so you can use NIC teaming to maximize the iSCSI throughput.

This G5 model features 5 PCI Express slots: 2 low profile slots and 3 full-size slots. The low profile FC HBA will be installed in slot 1 (x4). The P800 RAID controller installs in one of the x8 full size slots (slot 4 or slot 5). We will use it to attach the internal drives and more importantly for adding external shelves. This leaves us one half-height and two full size slots (an x8 and an x4) available for future expansion. We can later add additional Fibre Channel HBAs or multi-port NICs for additional iSCSI channels, and another P800, allowing us to expand up to 8 MSA shelves: scalability.