Abstract

How to choose hardware that permits drive identification. 

One aspect of managing a Swarm cluster involves the ability to readily identify volumes (drives) in your cluster when announcements related to them take place. These can include volume errors, volume retirement, volumes taken off line, and so on. In Swarm versions 7.5.4 or later, we've introduced the ability to support host bus adapter (HBA) and drive chassis combinations that support SCSI Enclosure Services (SES). For a quick primer on SES, you can start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Enclosure_Services

When presented with the question of, "what type of equipment should I use in my Swarm cluster?", we typically would recommend a combination of SAS JBOD controllers (examples include host bus adapters based on LSI's 2308 chipset) coupled with either internal or external drive arrays that support SES. Ideally, they would support SES-3. Your hardware vendor should be able to tell you if their enclosures are SES compliant or not; this information is usually made available as part of the server's or enclosure's specification for drive management.

Using SES compliant hardware in combination with our latest Swarm releases is your best choice to insure that drive identification is made as simple as possible. It's strongly recommended to take this consideration into account when shopping for hardware to support your next Swarm deployment. Should you have further questions regarding this, please contact the DataCore Support team or your DataCore account representative and we will be happy to assist you.