[Gllug] [Fwd: Server]

[Simon A. Boggis]

On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 10:07, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 09:52:20PM +0000, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> > At 20:21 23/11/2003 +0000, you wrote:
> > >The ICP Vortex cards are real RAID cards. Everything is done in hardware
> > >- you can build arrays before the operating system is installed.
> > 
> > Last time I looked at a Vortex card it didn't have an onboard battery 
> > backed cache.  It seems reasonable to assume that some of the Vortex range 
> > do, but I bet the price is much higher than the "entry level" option.
> 
> We had a couple of these, and I'm pretty sure they had batteries on
> the card, but I might be wrong.
> 
> The performance was nothing to write home about either, and both cards
> eventually failed and were sent back.

My counter-experience: we've bought somewhere close to 10 of them over
the last few years. All are still working and in service, the support at
vortex has been outstanding (you get to talk to a real engineer rather
than a support-monkey within seconds of calling, yay!).

I believe that the performance was as good as I could reasonably expect
- when I was first buying them we did speed comparisons with colleagues
running Compaq branded server kit and were well satisfied. I haven't
done the same recently myself, but when the "is it performing OK"
question came up whilst colleagues were setting up our latest server I
believe everyone was happy.

Battery backed cache was always an option on some cards (as opposed to
Comes-With) in the past.

Regards,

Simon


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug