On Oct 28, 2:15am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
} Subject: Hard Vs. Soft raid?
> HI,
Good day.
> I was wondering what would be a good hardware raid controller for use
> with RH 6.1? I'm looking at the Mylex extreme Raid. Is a hardware
> raid controller worth the money? Is it easier to set up, more
> reliable, less hassle?
I can speak very highly of the Mylex/IBM products. We have been using
DAC960's in production servers and have been happy with them. The
Mylex ExtremeRaid and AccelleRaid products trace their heritage back
to the DAC060's. Leonard Zubkoff's excellent driver for this
architecture is now in the mainline kernel sources so there is minimal
hassle from this perspective as well.
Going hardware or software is in essence a judgement call. The
software RAID performs better secondary to the greater resources that
the PII's with MMX can bring to the table. The hardware RAID option
is probably a more plug it in and forget about it solution at this
point in time.
If the decision to go with hardware RAID is made you will definitely
want to opt for SCA drives in some type of hot-swap enclosure. This
is especially true if Mylex is your selected vendor. Leonard's driver
supports control of the composite RAID volumes through the proc
filesystem. To realize the full advantage of RAID5 for
high-availability you will want to be able to pull and replace drives
if you happen to have a failure.
If a drive does fail out of a Mylex controlled volume you can simply
inspect the output from /proc/rd/cn/current_status and determine which
drive has been failed. With hot-swap you simply pull and replace the
drive and echo an appropriate rebuild command to
/proc/rd/cn/user_command and the array will be rebuilt. All this can
occur while the server is on-line and without apparent user
disruption.
The hardware RAID solution is also easier from a system setup
perspective at this time as well. Since the composite RAID volume
looks simply like another drive it can be partitioned and booted from
without any of the concerns that have been discussed with the software
solution.
So to re-iterate it comes down to pretty much a decision based on your
operating environment. I use both hardware and software solutions,
the decision pretty much comes down to the goals of the deployment.
> Any ideas on this subject will be greatly apreciated.
Hopefully this information is of assistance. Good luck with your project.
> Ralf R. Kotowski
Greg
}-- End of excerpt from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
As always,
Dr. G.W. Wettstein Enjellic Systems Development - Specializing
4206 N. 19th Ave. in information infra-structure solutions.
Fargo, ND 58102 WWW: http://www.enjellic.com
Phone: 701-281-1686 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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