On Sun, 2009-02-08 at 15:33 -0600, Sam wrote: > The software raid in linux with mdadm is very powerful. Alot of people > stay away from software raid because they think that a hardware solution > would be easier to work with. But with a hardware solution, how do you > monitor the status of your drives? There is usually windows software > for that but normally a linux client is non existent. All of the > monitoring and management is built into mdadm. Once you learn it, it is > very easy to use and you can move your raid array from system to system > as long as mdadm is installed. You certainly can't move a hardware raid > setup to another machine unless the cards are identical.
While I think that Linux software RAID is both solid and stable, when running a production environment I'd much rather use hardware RAID with hot-swappable drives. Example? Dell PERC RAID. Yes - historically there have been problems - but today it's rock solid. Monitoring it? Easy - there are Nagios plugins for omreport. Drive fails? Pull the drive and put the new one in. Nothing else to do. Same thing with HP DL-[35]xx class boxes... And if you're running, say, a farm of a few hundred servers, you can just have someone go in once a week armed with a list of disks to pull and replace. In short, IMHO, hardware RAID with hot-swap capabilities, on proven, STANDARDIZED hardware makes it easier (and cheaper) to support a larger number of boxes. (If you don't have standardized hardware, and tend to run somewhat of a mishmash, you're probably better off considering software RAID...) -I _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos