I've inherited a half dozen Dell PowerEdge 2650s with the PERC 3/Di Adaptec RAID controllers, mostly running old OpenBSD with the 'aac' RAID controller enabled.
I'd like to put as little money (and time) into these as possible while still bringing them up to the latest supported OpenBSD release, and keeping the Dell support contracts in place. I'm willing to consider trading these in, but I don't see affordable rackmount servers from Dell or Sun with redundant power and hardware RAID. These servers have been up and running for years (as in 1000 day uptimes) without major issues, and with no complaints about performance or corruption. How big a risk am I taking by reinstalling these machines with 4.0 and a custom 'aac' kernel? Has anybody successfully paid or pressured Dell to swap the PE2650 'aac' motherboards for a revision with the AMI MegaRAID embedded RAID chipset? Or added a PCI card for RAID using the "split backplane" feature of the PE2650? If the latter is the best option, any recommendation for an OpenBSD-friendly maker of standalone U160/U320 hardware RAID controllers for PCI? Something orderable from CDW or another major retailer would be a plus. Thanks, Kevin (P.S. One reason for specifying hardware RAID is to have a system with a strong chance of surviving (and/or rebooting after) a single failed drive. Other reasons are primarily political, same reasons we have only Sun and Dell hardware, and Dell "Gold" service contracts.)
