James Manning wrote:
>
> It's bound to get brought up here, so we might as well do it now.
> The release certainly seems to indicate a feeling that the current s/w
> raid is lacking (I think most if not all of us would dsagree at least
> to a large extent), so perhaps the best question(s) are:
It's to bad our press release has caused some misunderstanding of our
position
with respect to Linux software RAID. This was not intended nor desired.
Let me say
just a couple of things on this subject:
1. LAND-5, as far as I know, does not feel the current s/w RAID is
"lacking". We
in fact believe the opposite. To support this point let me emphasize
that LAND-5
is the only major enterprise storage company to actually build a product
line
based on it. We strongly believe that Linux software RAID is a solid,
reliable and
potentially high-performance RAID alternative. Otherwise we would not be
investing
substantial $$$ in promoting it. I have spent the better part of two
days explaining
to the commercial press why we feel this it true and why we feel that
Linux is
enterprise ready when our competition (namely IBM, Sun and HP), are
promoting
proprietary Unicies as enterprise level products.
No other supplier has done this or shown nearly the same confidence in
s/w RAID as
we have, including IBM which ships Netfinity servers with hardware RAID
controllers.
2. We have been testing s/w RAID for more than 8 months in both SCSI and
FC systems
and have found some issues which we intend to fix post haste. The most
significant
is performance. We have yet to get s/w RAID to perform any faster than
25MB/s
(according to Bonnie) in any configuration or RAID level. When my test
server
comes back from the LinuxWorld show I will post the numbers I'm talking
about and
perhaps you will offer some answers to this problem.
There are some bugs which we have fixed and we will be posting a patch
soon to fix
them. These mostly relate to hot-swapping drives and failure handling.
>
> 1) Is the MPL a problem given the kernel is (99.44%) GPL?
The code released is a management tool designed to make setting up and
managing
software RAIDs easier. Any and all enhancements we have made or will
make will be
GPL.
As such the following points are moot.
> 2) Do we have any tests to show where their code is faster and/or more
> CPU efficient?
> 3) How painful would a transition to/from their interface be for
> getting working browser interfacing (gives me the chills, but it may
> help acceptance)
> 4) *gasp* s/w raid versions were already confusing :) Now it's worse :)
> 5) Anyone on linux-raid knowledgable about the code, used it, willing to
> share experiences, etc? Esp. anyone that's used it and 0.90 too :)
>
I closing I just want to state that LAND-5 is 100% Linux, 100% software
RAID. We
have a number of engineers, including myself, working on improving it
and those
improvements will be GPL'd. To say that s/w RAID cannot be improved is a
somewhat
arrogant statement. Everything can be improved upon and until s/w RAID
beats the
pants off any h/w RAID solution I will keep working on it.
I can't speak for the marketing hype, but we've all been around long
enough to
understand it. The emphasis is on promoting Linux and s/w RAID to a
generally
hostile audience.
The preceeding statements are my own and not those of my employer.
--
Erik Petersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Head Software Engineer
Land-5 Corporation
