Hardware RAID and recommended controllers
Hi, new here, not new to Linux but a bit out of practice.
I'm getting ready to replace my old software RAID fileserver that's been around since '01 with a new box, and I'd like to make it as intuitive to operate once running as possible. Hardware wise, I'm looking at eight drives. Two small drives mirrored for the OS, five very large ( 1.5TB or 2TB ) drives RAID5, and one more drive like the five online as a hot spare. As for the rest of the computer, I've got a dual-Xeon 2.4GHz Socket 603 board and chips laying around, with 5 or 6 64 bit PCI-X slots, so I figured that I'd look for a controller that fits that board.
What I'm looking to find out is what distributions have good RAID tools for things like identifying drives as they go bad, switching over to rebuild the array off of a hot spare, etc, and what hardware would work best? I know that SAS will use SATA drives, so I'm probably going to go that way if I can find software to do this.
Most of my experience is with Debian, though I started with Slack and tried Redhat 5.1 and SuSE before ending up with Debian.
Comments
-
3ware products have always seemed to have great Linux support. They also support a command line interface (great for perl or bash processing).
Additionally, I believe the driver will log errors (drive failures and such) to syslog or /var/log/messages. With a file watcher, or splunk, you can easily trap the error and notify.0 -
I second the 3ware recommendation. All of the servers in our facility use a 3ware controller and I've never had any problems with them. The Linux kernel has had a 3ware driver for quite a while now and it's very stable. This makes it very easy to perform installations, since you don't need to install a third party driver.
As mentioned by dmjedli, 3ware has a command line interface utility called tw_cli. I wrote a simple bash script to periodically check the status of the RAID and if there is an issue I get a message sent to me. It works extremely well and has been rock solid for our purposes. 3ware also provides a web interface called 3DM2 that allows you to monitor the status of the RAID and perform various tasks.0 -
pm wrote:take a look on openfiler. (openfiler.com)
Openfiler is great to present storage. But, if you're looking for something to present iSCSI LUNS to ESX, XEN, or even a CIFS file share for a business, it should be backed by a good hardware RAID card.
Openfiler can stripe across block level disks, but it's still a software RAID.0 -
I'll give 3ware a look. Most of what I know in storage dates back to Adaptec and even Mylex, for what it's worth. Work needed me to be certed on some products so we could handle internal warranty service, and going through all of the SAS/iSCSI stuff got my interest piqued. It didn't hurt that my wife finally approached me about putting our movie collection on so we can access it without the need to play without the need for physical media either, and assuming a gig an hour we're looking at about 4tb for what we currently have. A moderately expensive controller with relatively cheap SATA drives seemed to be the best approach.
Now I just have to see if that fiberoptic module for my switch is still available. I have a PCI-X nic for the server, but something to hook it to would be nice...0 -
If you don't mind... throw up a post and let us know what you decided on! It's always neat to see how projects turn out.0
-
I'll do that. If nothing else, I've been out of it long enough (ever since I bought a laptop whose chipset had a weird clock issue double or triple advancing the clock) so I'm a little rusty.
So far parts that I already have (and have had for quite some time) include Supermicro P4DP6 motherboard, 8GB RAM, two Prestonia DP2200 Xeon processors, and an appropriate power supply.
I'm looking at a 3ware 9550SXU-8LP controller, which one e-bay vendor has for $299, a pair of cheap small 100gb or so SATA hard disk drives mirrored for the OS, and I'm still trying to figure out what large drives I'd like to buy five or six of. Seagate and Western Digital both seem to have 1.5TB+ drives, but both have a lot of negative reviews on them as well, and if I'm going to put something like this together I need it to be as reliable as possible. I do suppose that I could always change my array configuration if going with a slightly smaller drive would mean more reliable choices.0
Categories
- All Categories
- 60 LFX Mentorship
- 113 LFX Mentorship: Linux Kernel
- 618 Linux Foundation IT Professional Programs
- 321 Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 142 Advanced Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 55 DevOps Engineer IT Professional Program
- 68 Cloud Native Developer IT Professional Program
- 6 Express Training Courses
- 6 Express Courses - Discussion Forum
- 2.3K Training Courses
- 19 LFC110 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 9 LFC131 Class Forum
- 31 LFD102 Class Forum
- 176 LFD103 Class Forum
- 22 LFD121 Class Forum
- 2 LFD137 Class Forum
- 61 LFD201 Class Forum
- 2 LFD210 Class Forum
- 1 LFD210-CN Class Forum
- 1 LFD213 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 128 LFD232 Class Forum - Discontinued
- LFD237 Class Forum
- 23 LFD254 Class Forum
- 653 LFD259 Class Forum
- 108 LFD272 Class Forum
- 1 LFD272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 4 LFD273 Class Forum
- 2 LFS145 Class Forum
- 28 LFS200 Class Forum
- 740 LFS201 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 1 LFS201-JP クラス フォーラム
- 12 LFS203 Class Forum
- 92 LFS207 Class Forum
- 301 LFS211 Class Forum
- 54 LFS216 Class Forum
- 47 LFS241 Class Forum
- 41 LFS242 Class Forum
- 37 LFS243 Class Forum
- 12 LFS244 Class Forum
- 41 LFS250 Class Forum
- 1 LFS250-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS251 Class Forum
- 143 LFS253 Class Forum
- LFS254 Class Forum
- LFS255 Class Forum
- LFS256 Class Forum
- LFS257 Class Forum
- 1.2K LFS258 Class Forum
- 10 LFS258-JP クラス フォーラム
- 106 LFS260 Class Forum
- 145 LFS261 Class Forum
- 39 LFS262 Class Forum
- 83 LFS263 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 15 LFS264 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 11 LFS266 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 20 LFS267 Class Forum
- 18 LFS268 Class Forum
- 26 LFS269 Class Forum
- 204 LFS272 Class Forum
- 1 LFS272-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS274 Class Forum
- 3 LFS281 Class Forum
- 249 LFW211 Class Forum
- 177 LFW212 Class Forum
- 9 SKF100 Class Forum
- SKF200 Class Forum
- 907 Hardware
- 220 Drivers
- 74 I/O Devices
- 44 Monitors
- 116 Multimedia
- 210 Networking
- 102 Printers & Scanners
- 86 Storage
- 764 Linux Distributions
- 88 Debian
- 66 Fedora
- 15 Linux Mint
- 13 Mageia
- 24 openSUSE
- 143 Red Hat Enterprise
- 33 Slackware
- 13 SUSE Enterprise
- 357 Ubuntu
- 482 Linux System Administration
- 40 Cloud Computing
- 70 Command Line/Scripting
- Github systems admin projects
- 95 Linux Security
- 80 Network Management
- 108 System Management
- 51 Web Management
- 72 Mobile Computing
- 25 Android
- 32 Development
- 1.2K New to Linux
- 1.1K Getting Started with Linux
- 545 Off Topic
- 132 Introductions
- 223 Small Talk
- 22 Study Material
- 831 Programming and Development
- 282 Kernel Development
- 515 Software Development
- 974 Software
- 260 Applications
- 185 Command Line
- 3 Compiling/Installing
- 119 Games
- 318 Installation
- 65 All In Program
- 65 All In Forum
Upcoming Training
-
August 20, 2018
Kubernetes Administration (LFS458)
-
August 20, 2018
Linux System Administration (LFS301)
-
August 27, 2018
Open Source Virtualization (LFS462)
-
August 27, 2018
Linux Kernel Debugging and Security (LFD440)