I am working with 3 clusters of LefHand SAN iSCSI storage arrays. The modules are all older NSM 150s and NSM 160s (super micro server hardware, sata disks). The workload is low priority and all modules are no longer covered under a warranty or service contract.
They have been working just fine in their current state, but one unit has had a hard disk failure. Under warranty or service contract a new hard drive was initialized with a special utility by LeftHand Network support. Obviously I no longer have the option without paying a lot of money on an aging storage cluster.
So I am wondering if anyone has successfully put a foreign disk into a LeftHand RAID configuration and if so, how did you accomplish this? Just putting a new drive in the bay complains about it not having a lefthand signature when I add it to the RAID. My next step is to try to mirror one of the good drives to a new drive with the same (or greater) amount of sectors.
Last ditch efforts would be to remove the lefthand software all together and get ZFS filesystems spanning all the modules if OpenSolaris will install appropriately.
