Hi, In my working place, I've some PERC 5/i, 6/i, SAS 6/i, MD3000i (a low end iSAN). My 2 cents of opinion:
1. dump those fake RAID like shit! 2. the iSCSI SAN is a slow performer, although I have quite a lot of spindles (full house on MD3000i), but Ethernet is still Ethernet, it never comes close to the 'potential' 100MB/s. Configuration and using the Broadcom iSCSI offload driver are big hassles! 3. Both PERC 5/i and 6/i are still rock solid controllers, although Dell keeps on to sell me the 6Gbps H700, I just can't find a performance difference. The disks (spindles) in the RAID matter a lot, if you have a 8 10krpm disks in a RAID 5, it's very fast. Stephen WONG On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Adam Nielsen <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > After a recent fire in one of our data centres, it's time to go > shopping. As I've had many problems in the past trying to get > half-decent performance out of the drive controllers in Dell servers, > I'd like to know what others' experiences are. > > I don't need anything spectacular, but I'd like to have a dozen or so > people able to load their Word docs at the same time without it grinding > to a halt. Annoyingly I can get great performance out of Dell desktop > PCs with the same kernel version, just not out of the servers I've had > in the past. > > Mostly this seems to be caused by the disks being connected to an awful > hardware RAID controller, but I don't think Dell offer any servers using > the same onboard Intel SATA controllers that work really well on desktop > PCs. Haven't yet had a server with SAS disks, but as they all go > through a hardware RAID controller I'm a little dubious... > > So any suggestions/experience would be much appreciated! > > Many thanks, > Adam. > > _______________________________________________ > 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 > _______________________________________________ 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
