Picture of my custom Case

Each power supply powers one of the mainboards, and two of the fans (1 in/1 out).  Prior to putting the door on the case I’m going to add a shroud onto each of the IN fans, to direct air onto the motherboards.

I mounted the boards so that all of the connectors are facing forward for ease of access.

The systems will be direct connected by a Fiber connection and a copper connection.  The fiber connection will be through the Qlogic HBA that will be running a driver with TCP support for the DRBD replication.  The copper connection will be an additional ring for the cluster stack to communicate.

Each system will also have a fiber and copper connection that leaves the box and plugs into the appropriate switch.

I haven’t decided how I’m going to install the base storage of 4 disks (with plans to expand to 8 soon).  I’d like to have them in the case, but I’m concerned things might get to crowded – so I may build a small box and run them external.  I just have to make sure the SATA runs stay less than 1m.

Here’s a picture of the case I’ve built to house the computing end of my home SAN.  The lower two fans pull air into the case, the upper fans pull air out.