I have this Sun StorEdge A5200 sitting on my desk. It's taking up quite a bit of space actually, but the thing is heavy enough to discourage any attempts at moving it. I was planning on using it to play around with ZFS, but I decided to test with a bunch of SATA disks instead.
Right now the A5200 is connected to my Sun Blade 1000 workstation with two fibres and to my Linux workstation with another two fibres. It's still working perfectly (I have plenty of spare parts should that change) and from the Linux side it's working great. However, Sun has decided to no longer support the lowly QLogic QLA2100 cards (I think Sun calls it a FC100/P) I'm using. Or more specifically, they no longer support them on more recent hardware, such as my Blade 1000 with it's UltraSparc III CPUs.
I did some googling and appearently Sun decided to drop support for this specific QLogic card after Solaris 8. Appearently, it is possible to still use the Solaris 8 driver on Solaris 10 (given some effort), but I didn't try - here is some more info.
When I try to load the driver (isp) that is included with Solaris 10, it spits out a message telling me the cards are not supported on UltraSparc III machines. Maybe it would work on an UltraSparc II machine, such as an E450 or E4500 - I haven't tried. It would probably be possible to hack out the check preventing the driver to load but I'm not interested enough to try. Scrounging up some FC-AL cards that are supported is probably a quicker solution anyway.
While I still think the A5200 is a pretty cool piece of kit, maybe I should flog it off on eBay and buy something with a bit more short-term appeal. Something like a PTZ (Pan/Tilt/Zoom) housing for those new Panasonic WV-CP254H cameras I just bought would fit the bill.
