New server, scsi, raid, etc question

[bluegreenturtle]

So here's the situation - bear with me - I appreciate any advice.

A company I consult for generates a lot of data. They currently have 2 servers.
Spread between the 2 servers are (2) 73gb scsi drives (4) 18gb scsi drives (4)33gb scsi drive and (1)36gb scsi drive (an 80 pin converted to 68 pin). All drives are 68 pin except for that oddball at the end.

This setup is just the way it happened - they kept adding disks. It's horrible though because there are 11 volumes on the network. Stuff gets spread around, it's hard to find, disks get full, etc.

They have approved a new server to come up with a solution for their needs, with a cost of ~$3000 or less.

My inital plan was to just buy them a refurbished Dell that included SATA raid5, like a 6x250gb volume, which should hold them for a while at over a TB. I was going to get Small business server 2003, since they will use the integrated exchange, etc. Right now they're on a workgroup so I figured it would be a good time to migrate to a domain.


OK so the question. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? The thing that bugs me is that they've already got $$ sunk into these 11 scsi drives. I would like to still use them, but the 11 separate volumes thing has got to go. Neither of their current servers support RAID. All current servers seem to be 80 pin. These drives are all 68.


Could I do something like buy a Dell server that has SCSI RAID instead of SATA and external channels on the SCSI RAID card, and use a 68pin to 80 pin converter, run a cable over to the current servers (using them like an external case) and raid5 the current drives using the new controller? As in like this:

1)new server with new scsi array
2)external channel(s) leading over to old drives via a converter, controlling them in an array

= 2 or 3 separate arrays all controlled by the new server.

Can that even be done?

My apologies if unclear.

 

[Vegito]

Dell controllers are like 500 dollars.. retail.. very expensive.. ie the PERC3/DC

Will they be for storage only ? (the old drives)

So they dont have RAID right now ? sounds pretty dangerous..

I would ditch the 80 pin, unless you got a back plane for scsi.

crap I dont even know what to do..

 

[jose]

What type of mobo do they currently have ? Does it have a 64bit pci-x slot ?

Right off I'd spend as little as possible w/ the old hardware.. Maybe you can get a used scsi raid controller off ebay.
With this card you could build 4 volumes. 2 - raid 5, 1 - raid 1/0 , and use the last 36g as the OS boot drive.
That would cut your volumes down to 4. Use all the old hardware to build a new old server.

Now for the new server, find a motherboard that has a 64bit pci-x slot. (Xeon or Opteron) and look at the LSI & 3Ware sata controllers both are about the $500 range.

Then you could get some of the WD 250g raid ed. sata drives. You should be close to your budget.

Regards,
Jose

 

[bluegreenturtle]

I don't really think of it as dangerous - I've actually only seen a scsi drive go down once in my life and that was something wrong right out of the box. *ALL* drives are backed up nightly. (that was my addition to their network).

Current servers are poweredges; dell 1300 and a dell 1400. They unfortunately can only accomodate 4 drives in each of their cages plus 3 drive bays each, so all the old drives can't fit in one chassis (plus that's a lot on the PSU). Also unfortuantely the 73gb's are 1.6 inch drives. Then there is the issue of max number of devices on the current SCSI ribbon.

I like your thought jose, about the 3-4 volumes - that was the way I was going to go. Actually I think I might just use 2 of the 18gbs for boot volumes, toss the other 2. Put in one raid 5 including the 33's and one raid 0 volume for the 73s and call that ok. It will all be storage. I think maybe one could become an ftp server and one could become office admin stuff.

Gotta find the controllers though - I am ok with the ebay thing.