All: Here are a few quick notes & photos on ripping the PERC6 out of an r710 and replacing it with an Areca ARC-1680IX-12 :
Photos: http://digitalfreaks.org/~lavalamp/cp/thumbnails.php?album=52 1) The PERC6 performance is really poor. It's really slow to write on any RAID level. In RAID5, it averages writes ~30-50 MBps where as Areca cards average 300-400 MBps - It's even faster with ZFS on FreeBSD/amd64 RELENG_8 and some sysctl tweaks - The management interface is horrible, the documentation for the proprietary CLI is horrible, and after 10 years, its yet to be integrated into the IPMI BMC - It's probably not Dell's fault. LSI/QLogic makes the chip; blame them (But it's Dell that takes it in the hilt, repeatably, with every generation of server, when they renew the contract) I used to get faster disk I/O in my SBUS QLogic FAS408 in my SparcStation 20. Anyway, you get what you pay for with Dell;.. but you can get a lot more w/ Areca...for what you pay for with Dell!? 2) The latest r710 and PERC6 use the industry standard SAS SFF-8087 internal cable connector between the HBA and the backplane. That means you can just swap out the HBA, or if you're one of Dell's big embedded clients, order the unit w/o PERC6 or have Dell ship you whatever you want (3Ware?), probably. 3) Installation of the Areca ARC-1680IX-12 We used a PCIe x8 SAS RAID Card 2/512mb Cache. We purchased it off of NewEgg.com for appropriately the same price as a PERC6 adds to an r710. The LCD monitor and battery put it slightly over. The unit is PCIE-8x and there's 512 of DDR Cache onboard, 2GB DDR addon, with up to 4GB addon (PERC can't compete here). The card has it's own Intel IOP348 1200MHz CPU, an IPv4-enabled firmware (Web, SSH, Telnet, SNMP, SMTP), and very very decent mgmnt F/OSS support. You can see photos of the ARC-1680X-12 in Pictures 10, 13, 14. The external connectors on the card are: - RS232 over RJ11/RJ14 (The included cable terminates to DB9M) - Ethernet management - External SAS SFF-8088 3.1) Installation Notes In pictures 3 and 4, you can see the Dell SFF-8087 cables from the PERC6 terminating into the backplane. The cables run along a raceway on the right side of the case (oriented look at the faceplate) In pictures 1 and 2, if you remove the CPU/RAM cover and front fan bank, you can see the cables in the raceway. Trace them back to the PERC6 and disconnect them from the HBA (Dell used a proprietary ribbon connector on the PERC6 side; good thinking Dell! Look at how well proprietary worked for IBM, Sun, etc.). This connector can be seen in picture 6 and 12. . Pull the cables out of the raceway, then disconnect the SFF-8087 from the SAS backplane. As you can see in picture 6, the PERC6 is secured in place in a special PCIE port retainer that reminds me MCA or EISA cards in my PS/2 servers. The retainer is a T-16 hex nut head, as see in picture 8. Failing that, use an acetylene welder or plasma torch. Install your Areca card on the top PCI-E 8x/16x port (picture 15) Install the SFF-SFF cable, included with the Areca, as seen in picture into the r710 backplane raceway. See picture 16 and 20 You may need to run multiple SFF cables depending on your backplane configuration. Note: 90 degree angled cables would be best. Dell has the custom made apparently, I can't find them on the Interwebs, so I carefully bend the SFF connector. Restore the fan array and CPU/RAM cover. Note: Photo 21 the SAS/SFF cable goes above the cover, so tuck the cover under the cable (90deg cable mitigates this) Final cable routing seen in Picture 22. Restore case and experience an instantaneous "I/O'gasm' as your $16k server screams to life. Did I mention that the Areca has volume management built into it? >:} Walk directly to the local bar and buy everyone a few rounds with the money you saved by having a few fast severs instead a datacenter full of them trying to keep up with the Slony backlog. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions (or where to find some slick SFF-8087 cables with a 90deg angle connector) You can see a dmesg(8) for the r710 w/ areca for NetBSD/amd64 -current from last month at: http://www.nycbug.org/?NAV=dmesgd;f_dmesg=;f_bsd=;f_nick=;f_descr=;dmesgid=2016#2016 Thanks, ~BAS This mail was sent via Mail-SeCure System. _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
