Storage Connectivity Questions - C220 M4

[Austin Harsh]

I need to plug in more SAS connected disks to my C220 M4S server and I just have two questions.

First is, I noticed there are two SFF-8087 ports on the board but it doesn't look they support SAS (Cisco Documentation specifically says SATA only), however looking at the Intel C610 specs it looks like I might be able to purchase a hardware key to upgrade to 8 SAS disk support (RKSAS8). Would I be able to purchase this hardware key to unlock SAS connectivity? Or are these hardware locked into being SATA only?

If those ports are definitely SATA only, I would need to purchase a SAS card. My question here is if I purchase, let's say a LSI 9300-8e off of ebay, would that card be supported? Or would i have to buy a CISCO LSI 9300-8e card? (And by supported I mean that the card is identified in the BIOS so that the correct power and cooling profile is used, instead of being overridden by it being id as unknown)

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

The embedded software raid controller on the C220 M4 only supports Sata type disks regardless of the hardware key (that unlocks additional raid capabilities).

So as to your non-Cisco PID question,,, who ever you purchase your LSI 9300-8e raid controller from, is who you call for raid controller/storage support questions.  TAC will typically ask you to remove the non-Cisco parts during your troubleshooting call if the problem you are calling in on has anything potentially to do with the 3 party add-in device.

The CIMC would 'probably' recognize the card, and correctly profile it.  While based on the firmware releases from LSI/Avago/Broadcom, the UCS firmware for the raid cards can have tweaks and customizations that enhance the behavior/performance of the cards in the UCS environment.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Austin Harsh]

Kind of figured that about the onboard ports. I'll probably just pick up a card from ebay and see how it goes.

Thanks for reply and for your time!