[CentOS] 8-15 TB storage: any recommendations?

[John R Pierce]

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> My main issue with that kit is that the linux drivers are very basic, 
> lack most management capabilities and fail often with obscure issues. 
> And, as Peter pointed out already, they are not really exposing a proper 
> scsi interface, but modeled around a really old ata stack.
>   

One thing HP has attempted to do with all their smartarray cards is 
maintain RAID volume set compatability, so you can move a raid set from 
a failed server to another raid controller that has the same interface 
even if its a different controller..   most of the older cards at least 
were based on various megaraid hardware, but with custom HP firmware.    
On many of their systems, they actually put the battery backup write 
cache with the batteries on a little paddle card, and if a server fails, 
you can move the drives with that BBWC to a new server, and poof, its 
all good, the write cache is flushed to the drives and everyone is happy.


they definitely have some annoying habits.    I've got one server that 
has 4 bays on a split SCSI bus (bay 0/1 are one scsi bus, bay 2/3 are 
another).  I created a raid1 with volumes 0,1  and thought gee, I should 
use bays 0,2 instead.  well< I never figured out how to do it.  I tried 
adding 2 as a hotspare, then manually failing the drive in 1 (eg, 
yanking it out), the raid rebuilt with the spare, but its status was 
'failed w/ spare' and when I replaced the disk in bay 1, it restriped 
back to 0,1