[CentOS] [OT/HW] hardware raid -- comment/experience with 3Ware

On 03/06/2013 08:35 AM, Arun Khan wrote:
>
> Both appear to be well supported in Linux.

They are.

> I would appreciate your personal experience with the CLI tools
> provided by LSI.
> Can they be configured to send email for disk failures or SMART errors?

Not the CLI tools.  You'll need to run 3dm2.

> Is there a Web interface for monitoring?

Yes, that is also provided by 3dm2.

> Any preference between 1 and 2 above.

Based on about 10 years of running a hundred or so systems with 3ware 
controllers, I would say that you're better off with an LSI MegaRAID 
card, or with Linux software RAID.  3ware cards themselves have been the 
most problematic component of any system I've run in my entire 
professional career (starting in 1996).  Even very recent cards fail in 
a wide variety of ways, and there is no guarantee that if your array 
fails using a controller that you buy now that you'll be able to connect 
it to a controller that you buy later.

At this point, I deploy almost exclusively systems running Linux with 
KVM on top of software RAID.  While I lose the battery backed write 
cache (which is great for performance unless you sustain enough writes 
to fill it completely, at which point the system grinds nearly to a 
halt), I gain a consistent set of management tools and the ability to 
move a disk array to any hardware that accepts the same form factor 
disk.  The reliability of my systems has improved significantly since I 
moved to software RAID.