[CentOS] low end file server with h/w RAID - recommendations

Thu Nov 2 21:43:32 UTC 2017
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2017-11-02, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> If you have not Dell server hardware my choice of [hardware] RAID cards
> would be:
>
> Areca
> LSI (or whoever owns that line these days - Intel was the last one, I
> recollect)
>
> With LSI beware that they have really nasty command line client, and do
> not have raid watch daemon with web interface like late 3ware had (alas,
> 3ware after they were bought out several times by competitors were drawn
> down out of existence).

I believe Broadcom now owns LSI.  LSI killed the 3ware line soon after
they bought it, so the MegaRAID line is it from them now.

Seconded on the horrific LSI command line tools.  Actually they have two
tools, MegaCli and storcli.  They're both horrible, storcli slightly
less so.  OTOH once you get your arrays configured you can forget about
storcli (at least until a drive fails).

There are Nagios plugins that can check the status of LSI controllers,
arrays, and drives.  The plugin is nice even if you don't use Nagios;
it'd be pretty easy to write a short shell wrapper that sent email if
the plugin status wasn't OK.

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us