Re-purposing NetApp Controllers and shelves

[John Sheppard]

I happened to have come by a fairly large NetApp SAN with controllers and shelves of drives. It is about 768 TB raw. I'm getting the specifics of model #'s now and will post them tomorrow. My work purchased this SAN back in late 2014 and has just decommissioned it after it went out of warranty and replaced it was an even larger EMC SAN. This thing has always been rock solid. The only failure we've ever had was the power system on one array completely blew chunks and the array had to be replaced. We are a non-profit so they are not allowed to make money off of selling the old system so it was going to go to PC Recycle. I snagged it off of the loading dock with the blessing of my VP. It consists of 2 2U SAN Controllers, 13 1U - 24 2.5" storage arrays filled with enterprise class 600 gb SATA's and 2 1U - 24 2.5" storage arrays filled with enterprise class 256 GB SSD's and 1 2U - 24 3.5" storage arrays. All storage arrays have Dual 10Gbe and Dual 40Gbe and dual hot swap power supply's. I'm contemplating seeing if I could get FreeNas running on the controllers with the intent of donating this to a rural school in my area that doesn't have a large budget for computing resources. The reason for wanting FreeNas is because NetApp is such a PITA to deal with and unless you have money, they don't want to talk. I realize this is going to take some custom coding on my part, that's fine because that's I write C/C++ for a living. I post this here 1.) To see if folks think it is even possible and 2.) to see if there may be other people that have tried this 3.) If there might be folks who want to help with giving this a go. From my searching on here I have seen where folks have gotten NetApp storage shelves to play with the LSI controllers but I couldn't find anyone who had been able to leverage NetApp controllers for hosting FreeNAS. I'll post specifics about model numbers and memory when I talk with my IT operations folks today.

Thanks,

John

 

[John Sheppard]

Well looks like the NetApp is a pair of FAS3250-R6 controllers with 13 - DS2246-1014 disk shelves with 24, 600gb 10k RPM Sata's each, 2 - DS2246-SL048 with 24 200GB SSD ( was used for caching of data access ) and 1 DS4246-0772 disk shelf with 24 3TB 7.2k RPM Sata drives.

 

[drinking12many]

I know this is a little old but i dont know that it would take a lot, to be honest. Netapp controllers run a highly customized version of FreeBSD. I don't know about any custom firmware any cards/controllers might have. They do use NVRAM which might cause freenas some issues. Wikipedia says the CPUs are Dual 2.33 GHz Intel Xeon Quad Processor (L5410) (kinda low end by todays standards). Seems like a lot of kit for even a rural school, but good luck.

 

[kdragon75]

You can use it as a NetApp or replace the controller with a new box and HBA.

 

[blanchet]

It would be a pity to run FreeNAS on such a Netapp hardware because Netapp Ontap is faster and more reliable than FreeNAS.
It is very reasonable to run a Netapp filer without a support contract for not-critical workload, because their hardware is very reliable and redundant, so in case of failure you have enough time to purchase a used part on ebay.
In your case, you can keep half of the controllers and disks for spare, so then you can run this filer for years without needing to purchase any part.