[Gllug] Hardware SCSI RAID

[Ian Northeast]

Matthew Cooke wrote:
> gah. had software raid on fedora and wasn't impressed at all. a disk 
> failed and wrote something into a log and I didn't notice for 2 months. 

That's what mdadm's monitor mode is for. It can run a script when any 
event happens in your arrays. The script can then analyse the event and 
raise an alert by whatever means you require - send an email, SNMP trap 
or whatever.

BTW I like IBM's "ServeRAID" hardware RAID cards but am not at all 
enamoured of the Symbios controllers they put in some cheaper servers. 
I've had arrays trashed with these when the controller failed and was 
replaced by a new one with a later BIOS which wasn't compatible with the 
  metadata on the disks! This defeats the point.

I prefer a *good* hardware RAID to software, it's a lot simpler, but 
Linux's software RAID is IMHO superior to some cheap and nasty hardware 
RAID controllers.

Software RAID is IME much easier if your distro's installer supports it 
properly. We run SLES, and in the current version 9 it's pretty 
straightforward, but in the (still supported) V8 it's a bit of a pig.

Regards, Ian

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