Lajber Zoltan wrote:I just have a better feeling about hardware when there are dozens of multi-TB servers from NY to CA. If it goes down IBM fixes it instead of someone trying to get it back up at the console.
We have about 7 serverraid card from 4L to 5i. All of them is sitting on
shelf. They are pain to manage, ipssend tool is weak, serverdirector
complicated. And they are slow, the Fusion MPT SCSI with sw raid
significant faster, as we measured with bonnie++. Even the old aic7892 is
faster (these built-in scsi controllers on xseries motherboards).
The 6i and 7 series of cards seem to have quite a bit better relative speeds. Certainly the 4Lx cards can be outperformed in simple "hdparm" tests by a 3ware SATA controller/disks of half the price..
Plus, software RAID can't provide good performance on many server/DB applications without risking data loss in certain cases - for such things one really wants something with a battery-backed cache on it..