[luau] videl.ics.hawaii.edu disk failure - Your Help Needed

[Brian Chee]

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" <warren at togami.com>
To: <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
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
>
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