[Gllug] Hardware recommendation, esp. SANs and shared storage

[Chris Ball]

>>> On Thu, 8 Aug 2002 18:42:32 +0100 (BST), Simon Trimmer <simon at urbanmyth.org> said:

   ST> Applying raid at the array level is pricey, so I havn't looked in
   ST> that direction, but you certainly want raid somewhere as disks
   ST> fail scarily often. 

I'm working with a fibrechannel SAN running VeritasFS with SCSI RAID.  

   ST> Fibre channel cards.  Overall, the best cards I've used are the
   ST> QLogic 22xx and 23xx series. There are plenty of fully open
   ST> source drivers (including their own) and the performance is
   ST> extremely good. Don't be fooled by the source emulex driver, it
   ST> builds wrappers and links against a binary core.

We've had problems with the Emulex drivers.  The latest revision doesn't
work with our firmware, downgrading to an older revision broke things
even more, and the version we're currently running very occasionally
exhibits SCSI errors and then panics the RAID array.  You'd be surprised
how hard it is to try and perform sensible debugging on raw SCSI errors
over fibrechannel..

   ST> We had a couple of compaq boxes, they can have some wierd array
   ST> hardware but I think we got them working well enough. They aren't
   ST> here anymore.

I like Compaq a lot.  They have things like PXE and virtual floppy on
their workstations, so the machines are nice and easy to maintain.
Haven't any experience of their large x86 servers, though.

- Chris.
-- 
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