Hello!
I'd like to introduce release of Einarc project - an universal RAID
management/monitoring tool.
Some time ago, I've started working with various hardware RAID
controllers and quickly was disappointed by the fact that almost all of
them require proprietary utilities to manage. For example, it's
virtually impossible to monitor RAID status from running Linux without
installing one on Areca, Adaptec, LSI, 3ware, CCISS, etc controllers.
Moreover, all these proprietary utilities were sometimes hard to find
and every one of the have a different interface, command line options,
etc. There seemed to be even no standard for entities hierarchy: Areca
uses 3-tier hierarchy (physical discs - raidsets - volumesets), LSI uses
2-tier one (physical - logical discs).
So, after giving it some thought and searching for a solution to unite
them all, I've found out that there almost no such thing. ManageEngine
OpStor is a proprietary and pretty expensive product that can do it and
only other attempts in this area seemed to be OpenBSD's bioctl
initiative that faded out in 2005-2006.
Generally, the idea is simple: Einarc works as a translator that makes
it possible for a user to control all these devices using simple terms
like “physical disc”, “logical disc”, “adapter”, etc, while
transparently converting these requests to proprietary RAID paradigms.
In fact, the system still uses underlying proprietary CLIs, but the user
doesn’t interact with them directly, staying in a single,
well-documented interface.
During its installation, it automatically downloads these proprietary
utils (after reading & agreeing to their licenses), unpacks and installs
them, and then, for example, command like
einarc -t areca physical list
would be translated into
/usr/local/lib/einarc/areca/cli disk info
then it's result parsed and returned in the same well-documented form as
for any other Einarc-supported adapter.
I'd be really happy to hear any opinions / thoughts / feature requests
on this project and I hope it would come useful to someone :) Einarc can
be reached at
http://www.inquisitor.ru/doc/einarc/
for downloading and documentation.
--
WBR, Mikhail Yakshin AKA GreyCat
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