New Dell EMC2 user; first time help

i have a feeling you did not buy all the needed components, take a look at this discussion

Assistance with KTN-STL4 CX Series for a school

I actually thought you bought a SAN, but after seeing the pictures, it looks like you bought a storage array, except, as dynamox said, you're missing components. I don't see any disks and I'm missing power supplies and LCCs.

If you want to start running a storage array, you'll need storage processors and their OS disks. You can connect hosts / HBAs back to back to a storage array, so you don't need a SAN. If you want to connect several hosts, more than FC ports on the array, you'll need to buy a SAN.

By the way: SAN means "Storage Area Network" --> these are the switches you use to connect the storage to the servers. Don't call a storage array a SAN, because these are different things!

If this is an old Clariion system  you would need the first 5 drives. The original ones, at least with the original EMC software on it. You cannot simply clone these disks from another Clariion and I think you'd better contact EMC to buy these drives, while they still support these systems.

For just 1 or 2 servers, you don't need a SAN since you can connect the HBAs directly to the storage ports on the back of the Storage Processors.

Thank you for your reply.

So in laymans terms, what I have will not connect to my server right? If I buy a switch, will I be able to connect this enclosure to a switch and then the switch to my server?

I do have one hard drive in there and I have a power supply in there. I just don't know how to connect this lol.

Hey Dynamox,

Unfortunately I do not work in a data center. I work in a NOC, but am very interested in finding a spot working as a data center engineer. So for learning/self study I figured I would set one of these up in my rack at home. As a hobby/interest, I do want to get a rack mountable (affordable) enclosure that I can put in my rack and add large 1TB drives as needed as a NAS type storage solution. If you have any guidance/recommendations I would be grateful.

Sounds like I wasted my money on this huh? Should I give up while I'm ahead and list this up on Ebay?

what are your interests, do you want to get into virtualization or storage. If you want to get into virtualization and need some "shared" storage, there are many much cheaper alternatives (open source FreeNAS, Open Filer ..etc). Getting into enterprise storage is going to be tougher because storage arrays are so expensive for home users. If you still want to pursue getting an enterprise array at home, i would look for the whole array. You will find a bunch of components online but they are just a bunch of extra parts ..you need to buy the entire array where the seller guarantees operational condition.

Hey Dynamox,

For home use I want to do more storage (I want to do all my backups, movie streaming, etc etc in one central place). I am also going to experiment with VMWare a bit (I have a Dell 2850 ready to go). I'm willing to spend a few hundred bucks, but don't want to spend thousands.

I have poked on ebay for rackmount NAS, and the lower cost ones are around $500. Dunno why they're so expensive; I'm fine getting something with just 1 500MB or 1TB drive, and adding drives as I go, but dunno where to start? I've seen the synology NAS's for like $200 but they aren't rack mount.

For the FreeNAS, would I take something like a Dell 2850 put that on as the OS and then that would be a form of NAS?

Thanks for all your help/wisdom.

for $200 you are not going to buy a rack mounted system. Yeah, take a look at FreeNAS and OperFiler. Basically you install the OS and it allows you to share internal storage via CIFS/NFS and iSCSI, ..pretty slick. You can use it as your movie repository and as a VMware datastore.

Openfiler | Openfiler