Putting up a SAN in a phased implementation

Sure is, but it's going take a heck of a lot of bridges! Most bridges today come with one or two FC ports and around four FWD high-density SCSI ports. You can put around 15 disks per SCSI bus (watch performance though), and there will be no RAID capability if you attach the disks directly.

What I would do is put a bunch of RAID SCSI adapters in the PCI slots of two very fast servers, use "Y" adapters on the ends of the busses with external termination and SHARE the busses with another node using an MSCS cluster to share out the SCSI storage as file shares. This would give you RAID, and high availability for the SCSI storage, and would create your own highly available NAS appliance. Another method would be to purchase host-based virtualization hardware or software, and let the virtualization engine share out the connected SCSI disks. (The bridges can be used in this approach also).

You may find it beneficial to put out an RFP (request for proposal) to the major storage vendors for your environment. You may find they will be willing to "buy back" some or all of your SCSI disks to help you reduce the cost of an initial SAN investment. The age of the disks will determine the total of the buy-back.

Chris

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