Re: Storage server
Am Montag, 10. September 2012 schrieb Jon Dowland:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 09:51:05PM +0200, lee wrote:
> > Some people have argued it's even better to use software raid than a
> > hardware raid controller because software raid doesn't depend on
> > particular controller cards that can fail and can be difficult to
> > replace. Besides that, software raid is a lot cheaper.
>
> You also get transferrable skills: you can use the same tooling on
> different systems. If you have a heterogeneous environment, you may
> have to learn a totally different set of HW RAID tools for various
> bits and pieces, which can be a pain.
I think you got a point here.
While the hardware of some nice LSI / Adaptec controllers appears to be
excellent for me and the battery backed up cache can help performance a
lot if you configure mount options correctly, the software side regarding
administration tools in my eyes is pure and utter crap.
I usually installed 3-4 different packages from
http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages
in order to just find out which tool it is this time. (And thats already
from a developer who provides packages, I won´t go into downloading tools
from the manufacturers website and installing them manually. Been there,
done that.)
And of course each one of this goes by different parameters.
And then do Nagios/Icinga monitoring with this: You basically have to
write or install a different check for each different type of hardware raid
controller.
This is so utter nonsense.
I really do think this strongly calls for some standardization.
I´d love to see a standard protocol on how to talk to hardware raid
controlllers and then some open source tool for it. Also for setting up
the raid (from a live linux or what).
And do not get me started about the hardware RAID controller BIOS setups.
Usabilitywise they tend to be so beyond anything sane that I do not even
want to talk about it.
Cause thats IMHO one of the biggest advantages of software RAID. You have
mdadm and be done with it. Sure it has a flexibility that may lure
beginners into creating setups that are dangerous. But if you stay by best
practices I think its pretty reliable.
Benefits of a standard + open source tool would be plenty:
1) One frontend to the controller, no need to develop and maintain a dozen
of different tools. Granted a good (!) BIOS setup may still be nice to be
able to set something up without booting a Linux Live USB stick.
2) Lower learning curve.
3) Uniform monitoring.
Actually its astonishing! You get pro hardware, but the software based
admin tool is from the last century.
Thats at least what I saw. If there are controllers by now which come with
software support that can be called decent I´d like to now. I never saw an
Areca controller, maybe they have better software.
Otherwise I agree to Stan: Avoid dmraid. Either hardware RAID *or*
software RAID. Avoid anything in between ;).
Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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