Re-purposing NetApp Controllers and shelves

[John Sheppard]

Cross posting here because I screwed up and posted to the wrong place first. :(

I happened to have come by a fairly large NetApp SAN with controllers and shelves of drives. It is about 768 TB raw.

• 2 - FAS3250-R6 controllers - 128 gb RAM
• 13 - DS2246-1014 disk shelves with 24 600gb 10k RPM Sata's each
• 2 - DS2246-SL048 disk shelves with 24 200GB SSD ( was used for caching of data access )
• 1 - DS4246-0772 disk shelf with 24 3TB 7.2k RPM Sata drives.

All storage arrays have Dual 10Gbe and Dual 40Gbe and dual hot swap power supply's.

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.

I'm contemplating getting 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. I am fine with that because that's I write C/C++ for a living.

I post this here because

1. To see if folks think it is even possible
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 the FreeNas forums, 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.

Thanks,

John

 

[styno]

This -in theory- should be possible as Ontap itself is BSD-based. I am not sure it's worth the time & effort, especially if you have cifs & nfs licenses for Ontap.