Hi, LINUX raid-ers,
I am in the process of designing a proposal for a hardware RAID filesystem
for my lab. We already have a master node,
a dual PIII 600 with 256MB of RAM that connects to our router via 100BT.
the clients are mostly 10BT and a few 100BT
workstations, plus a beowulf cluster which is currently using the PIII 600
as the master node.
Here is what I am currently thinking of as a solution:
1 UPS with enough power to run at least the drive array and also
the master node. Should have a way to communicate with the master node
in case of power failure.
1 Rackmount enclosure which fits drives & has correct drive connectors &
power supply, hot-swap and SAF/TE
4 drives 36gig Ultra 2 SCSI (or LVD? or Ultra 3?) (3 active drives & 1 hot
spare)
1 SCSI RAID controller card (DPT Smart V or VI, Mylex Acceleraid 250, ICP
Vortex 6518rd)
with 8MB cache and Ultra2 support, SAF/TE support
>From poking around the kernel, and reading some stuff on web sites, and
visiting the vendor websites, it seems like the less expensive cards
($500-1000) typically don't have a battery backup for the cache on the card.
I was thinking, however, that
the UPS makes the cache battery unecessary. Is this a valid belief? Or is
there a situation where having the battery backup
is a good idea?
Also, exactly what will having SAF/TE support on the card and the drive
enclosure gain me? Any pointers to SAF/TE documentation online would be
appreciated.
Will I save a lot of $$$ by eliminating the requirement for hot-swap and
SAF/TE on the rackmount enclosure?
If I don't have hot-swap support in the enclosure, do I have to power down
the raid array to swap drives,and
can I do that without powering down the master?
Also, this may be a religious issue, but which of the cards I listed above
best supported under linux?
I believe there are 2.2 drivers for all of them, and userspace RAID
configuration management for all three
(DPT, Mylex, and ICP Vortex) so that I could configure the RAID array once
the system is booted
rather than going through a BIOS configuration.
Thanks for any info
Dave
