Am 21.08.2009 um 19:08 schrieb Peter Kjellstrom:
On Friday 21 August 2009, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
We have a few (p800). My opinion is that they're acceptable but not fast.
Heard this a few times now, in the interest of getting something better next time, what have you found equally reliable but faster?
Nothing as cheap as a full dl185 that's for sure unless you count SUNs thor (thumper ng) machines but then you'll have to do the raid part in software somehow.
Yeah, but that is as easy as zpool create tank raidz2 dev1 dev2 dev3 dev4 dev5 dev6 etc. zfs create tank/bigdisk
But I'd go one step further and use one of SUNs OpenStorage devices. Once you have a lot of no-name JBOD SATA-drives, the inability of Solaris to light-up the yellow light of the broken one will make it painfully obvious that while one can spend to much on storage, one can as easily spend too little... ;-)
If you really want to go with a HW controller, try Areca or the high- end 3Ware models.
As mentioned in any ZFS document, when you use a HW-raidcontroller, the OS never knows if a drive is broken or showing errors. The HW hides that from the OS. You have to have closed-source drivers like the HP utils to tell you that.
If your data-set will, over the lifespan of that server, never grow beyond the original size of the array, then you can go with a HW- raidcontroller. Otherwise, go ZFS.
Rainer