Speaking from experience (I cannot go into detail on this point), and as Digimer pointed out, LSI seems to be the only choice for enterprise level, large scale deployments.
If your concern is extremely long term deployments with verifiable data recovery options, software RAID is the only option, as you have strong guarantees that the implementation will never "die" as hardware RAID controllers are likely to do.
As others have pointed out, there are indeed tangible benefits to using hardware RAID controllers. It all depends on your use case and project requirements. On May 8, 2016 6:51 PM, "Valeri Galtsev" galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
On Sun, May 8, 2016 8:42 pm, Digimer wrote:
On 08/05/16 09:02 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
On Sun, May 8, 2016 7:31 pm, Digimer wrote:
On 08/05/16 08:12 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
On 5/6/2016 2:26 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
Which internal hardware RAID controllers will survive some future to come in your estimate. First of all my beloved 3ware finally seems to have passed away. After multiple acquisitions and becoming part of LSI and getting bought with LSI, it probably became non operational. Namely, the latest 3ware cards have ancient firmware. Neither of them supports 4kn drives. This speaks for itself for me. [Under new ownership] LSI, though still having new controllers released, and one of their MegaRAID controllers (at least) having support for 4kn drives, still may not last long (just my feeling, I'd like to hear yours). So, what RAID controllers will those of us who like to have hardware RAIDs use in some future to come?
IMHO, "Hardware" (really embedded firmware) RAID is for Windows servers, since MS Windows has awful integrated software raid (aka 'dynamic disk', truly a mess). With Linux, I'd rather use LVM, with BSD, ZFS.
"Hardware RAID" can very well include a controller with dedicated parity processing, battery/flash backed write caching and other tangible benefits.
Right, by "hardware RAID" as opposed to a bit more often used term "software RAID" I did mean the card that has RAID processing done by the chip on board of the card (parity or in other words modulus 2 sum in case of RAID-5, and more sophisticated math in case of RAID-6 - I have heard of at least two algorithms suitable for RAID-6). Thanks, Mr. Digimer, for clarifying my somewhat vague in this place post.
We're not all "Mr".
Sorry, my usual stupidity... Some time I hopefully learn to be, hm... "wiser"?
Any insight, anybody, which hardware RAID cards of rather which manufacturers of these cards will still make them in a future (say next 5 years)? Even if you just have feelings, without any thought why, I would like to hear them. If you prefer to answer off the list, please, e-mail me directly at galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu
Thanks a lot!
Valeri
LSI brand cards are very common across enterprise (I think all tier-1 vendors, except HP, use LSI (now Avago) based controllers. Given that, I would expect their cards will be available for quite some time to come.
Thanks a lot for your insights! This already makes me feel better. In the past LSI would be my definite second choice, and 3ware was winning me only by their transparent web interface. (Several other things LSI had better than 3ware IMHO...)
Thanks again!
Valeri
-- Digimer Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.ca/w/ What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a person without access to education? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos