[weblacky]

If I had to make some kind of guess based on what's on the board. I would say it looks like some form of fiber channel arbitrated loop RAID controller.

Here's my thinking, even though it's not as popular SGI did use copper DB9 connectors for FCAL a lot before we all agreed on fiber optic media.

There's all those memory banks in it which would make total sense if it was a RAID controller versus even a normal drive controller.

There's chips from LSI on it which to me screams drive controller.


There's a couple big items that aren't LSI which to me screams management or brain chip that uses drive controllers.

It has a battery holder to save the settings one might ordinarily need with a RAID controller.

The two bottom ports that look like DB 25 and DB9 serial could actually be how you interface to the unit. Instead of writing all this custom management software they could've simply gave you a cable to hook to your system's native serial and told you to start a terminal session to it and to type the following commands to manage your RAID volume.

There is however one very glaring issues with my guess: there are only three DB9 port cluster together and FCAL would normally be in pairs, most common stuff would have two channels with a pair of ports on each channel using the a A&B channels available on the drives for multipath or alternate path connections.

Perhaps if somebody can get the spec for FCAL they might find if there's a voltage difference between that and serial they could be measured on one of the ports to see if it is in fact expecting an FCAL copper connection.

But without a view of different connectors or more components that's my guess.