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
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