[CentOS] Internal RAID controllers question

Mon May 9 01:42:31 UTC 2016
Digimer <lists at alteeve.ca>

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".

> 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 at 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.

-- 
Digimer
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