RAID options under Fedora

[Seth Bardash]

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-list-admin at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Xose Vazquez
Perez
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 2:46 PM
To: fedora-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: RAID options under Fedora


WipeOut wrote:

> I would say the software RAID built into linux is better than
most of 
> the IDE RAID cards on the market..

And *SCSI RAID* too. There are too much bad HW RAID out there.

-----Original Message-----

TWIMC - Concerning HW RAID:

We have deployed over 200 systems at various customer sites with
3ware IDE raid controllers over the past year. We also use them
exclusively in house. See
http://www.integratedsolutions.org//internal_pci.htm or
http://www.3ware.com for details.

These controllers survived the Virginia Hurricane at our ISP's
site and endured 132 degree F ambient temps (their NOC lost
cooling but not power) for 3 days without any failures as did the
disk arrays.

1) We have not had one fail in the field or inhouse and all our
servers use them. My dual cpu workstation has one in it set up as
RAID 0 with 2 disks for speed and it benchmarks at better than 98
MB/sec for both Windows XP Pro and linux RH 9 for intelligent
reads and writes (It's a dual boot machine).

2) A RAID 10 setup with 4 or 6 IDE disks can sustain - yes sustain
- 90 to 120 MB per second for 100 Mbyte transfers over the whole
array measured using zcav (a utility that comes with bonnie++).

3) The 3dm daemon based utility allows complete control and
maintenance of the array via a web browser.

4) The driver source has been public domain and included in linux
since kernel rev 2.2.15 - check your machine in the
/lib/module/kernel/scsi directory for file 3w-xxxx.o - its
there!!! You can easily update the driver to the latest kernel by
downloading the source from the 3ware web site and following the
directions. This allows you to upgrade the kernel as often as you
like and then update the drivers if needed.

5) The increase in performance while maintaining data redundancy
is amazing and done completely in hardware unlike the promise  and
other based controllers.

Check out the benchmark on our web site under storage for the
actual numbers.

Seth Bardash

Integrated Solutions and Systems

http://www.integratedsolutions.org

Supplier of AMD, Intel and SPARC Servers and Systems running
Windows, Linux, Solaris and VxWorks.