Tom,

I've been trying to get a stable iSCSI SAN for my Macintosh environment for almost 2 years. I'm ready to give up and look at Fiber Channel.

I just need a fast RAID-5 that two or more Mac users can access at the same time. I already have expensive cluster SAN software that supports FC as well as iSCSI. Could you please allow me to walk you through my proposed setup and tell me if I should proceed?

I currently have a working Open-E iSCSI Enterprise target (working well with non-Mac initiators that is). Supermicro PCI-X motherboard, 3ware 9550sx card, 16 SATA disks, and two quad-port Intel MT/1000 nics.

My idea is to buy DSS to replace the DOM. And to buy a Qlogic QLA2342 card to replace the Intel nics. Is that all I would need to create a Fiber Channel SAN box?

As far as outside the box. I don't even want to bother with a switch right now. I just want to have two clients connected directly. The Qlogic card has two ports. Can one client connect to one port, another client to the other port, and have them both access the same volume at the same time?

Thanks for your help.