sha1024md5

You can go direct with fiber channel, I have done it. I have little doubt you can get 'a SAN connection' with ESOS and Unraid. I have no idea if ESOS supports the drivers for your fiber cards out of the box, I used QLogic cards as it has good driver support. If your cards have funky drivers you may need to compile that into a custom ESOS build, instead of just using a standard image.

Yes, you can get used server hardware and use that. You can find very affordable servers in the 5-10 year range, and tailor it to your specific needs. Many of the cheap servers come in a barebones configuration, and may not include cpu, memory, hard drives, hard drive caddies, network cards, raid cards, and other hardware. So be on the lookout or be ready to customize the server to your needs. The thing to keep in mind for unraid when it comes to older servers is your going to want the host bus adapters for SAS and not the RAID cards. You don't want to present the the drives in a raided array, you need to pass them directly to unraid, so a host bus adapter over raid is usually a must. Luckily most of the bigger brands offer a choice of raid or host bus cards.

So I came upon this post from google, considering doing a similar thing, and wondering if Unraid could do this on my build. The only way I could think it could work is since Unraid doesn't support Fiberchannel out of the box, you need to work around that limitation. My idea was that I would create a VM and use ESOS (Enterprise Storage OS), and pass through the fiber channel card to it. I was thinking there are two likely options for block level storage targets: 1) create vdisks and pass them as raw disks, that way you would gain all the benefits of unraid software raid, then have ESOS serve those targets to the initiators 2) pass an actual physical disk target via pass through, say for instance you wanted a tape, cdrom, or an old hard drive as a target. Just make sure you understand the difference between a SAN and a NAS, your passing a block level device to a fiber channel initiator. It's not going to work like a NIC, it's not going to be shareable by multiple computers at the same time, it's just going to be a hard drive that shows up on your server/computer but it's hosted remotely. Just make sure this is what you actually want.