Just in case there are folks on this list with money....the last Storage Area Network Shootout I did for Infoworld had HP/Compaq, EMC and IBM. All three were looking at having serialATA based JBOD (disk arrays) cases with 2gb/sec Fiber Channel interfaces on them. This should dramatically drop the cost of VERY large disk arrays in the near future. (Serial ATA2 is 1.5gb/sec transfer rate with 3.0gb/sec on the drawing board) Linux drivers tend to show up very early since much is based upon open source HBA drivers.
Look at it this way, you can have up to 15 SATA drives in the JBOD and then the only real limit on how many JBODs you can have is the size of the fiber channel switch. Even better news is that SAN over IP is here and I saw both HP and IBM demonstrate it over normal gigabit switches. All the SAN vendors are stating support for the emerging 10gb switch standard as a near future push. So since Fiber Channel switches cost a king's ransom, being able to use something as cheap as a NetGear gig switch to link up JBODs means that I can carve up the JBOD into pieces that can be shared by several servers. Upgrades mean I just carve a new LUN (logical unit) and do an internal copy and lastly change the LUN pointer for the server. All this without having to mortgage my house. It also means that using a metro area network connection (sprint, HEI, net enterprise, etc) I would be able to mirror my arrays across town from each other. /brian chee University of Hawaii ICS Dept Advanced Network Computing Lab 1680 East West Road, POST rm 311 Honolulu, HI 96822 808-956-5797 voice, 877-284-1934 fax ----- Original Message ----- From: "Warren Togami" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 11:40 AM Subject: Re: [luau] videl.ics.hawaii.edu disk failure - Your Help Needed > Brian Chee wrote: > > > Beware, I've just been burned by the Promise ATA/133 RAID controller...it > > will only rebuild the array if you give a new drive of identical > > geometry....unlike SCSI based raid which only need a similar or larger sized > > drive. > > > > I'm exploring 3ware's offerings and am enthusiastic about their SATA based > > RAID controllers...should give similar performance to 1gb/sec Fiber Channel > > but for a heck of a lot less money. > > > > Once I get one running, I'll report back to the list....oh yeah, 2gb Fiber > > channel is truly wonderful stuff under redhat....I used Qlogic HBA's and > > they scream.... > > > > /brian chee > > Indeed, there are currently ZERO usable ATA RAID controllers other than > 3ware. Promise & High Point controllers in particular are the worse of > the bunch, and should never be used for anything but single disks. > > Warren > > _______________________________________________ > LUAU mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/luau
