I got a Storedge D1000 and I'm running centos and would like to manage all the disks from my centos box. If I buy regular scsi card and cable, that should work right? OR do I need to buy any special cable and card for it? Thanks in advance.

You want to be very careful about that. You can get full documentation of the D1000 here http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/d1000-arrray?l=en. While it is not totally clear, the connections are NOT LVD. They are 68 pin Differential UltraSCSI, but I'm virtually certain that the differential is not the later low voltage differential. You'll blow it if you use the wrong one. So, NO, you don't just want what you might call a "regular" SCSI card. If you were on Sun hardware, you would get the part number from the documentation linked above. Since you are not, look up the details on that and then try to find the corresponding card for the machine you have, or talk to the place you got your server.

For its time, the D1000 was an awesome device. What was cool was that the two sections of 6 disks are each on their own SCSI bus with their own SCSI connector. If you use software raid, you could configure it so that the two sets of 6 mirrored each other, and it was really fast. Of course, it doesn't have hardware raid. That was the difference between it and the A1000.

Thanks a lot for the info. I want to run veritas clustering on these boxes. Have you tried clustering using D1000? If I understand correctly, IF I put U cable I can see all the disks from each host. Am I right?

No.It's a traditional scsi box of disks. scsi chain. terminated.

Because it is two separate sets of 6 drives, each with their own scsi chain, you can connect it in a couple of different ways. You can get a dual scsi card for your server and connect each server connector one the the sets of six drives. Each set gets terminated. That gives you maximum throughput. Or, you can connect one connector from the server to one of them, connect the two of them with a short scsi cable, and terminate the second. That puts all 12 in one scsi chain. Finally, if you want to split the 12 drives between 2 servers, you can connect each server to one set of six and terminate each set of six. Neither server can see the other servers drives.