[geeks] IBM rant

[Bryan Fullerton]

On 11/30/06, Dan Duncan <dand at pcisys.net> wrote:
> > Don't get me started about HostRAID.
>
> Luckily we aren't using hostraid.  We disable it immediately and use
> the drives separately.  The machines basically load-balance
> jobs so they're massively redundant and it's not worth the
> extra resources to use RAID on them.

Yeah, it'd be nice to have real hardware RAID mirroring for our
applications, just for redundancy. From my understanding, HostRAID is
kindof like a winmodem -- most of the functions are actually
implemented in the driver, with a bit of hardware assist.

> We're using the RSA cards so we only have a card in every 24th machine.
> The other systems have two connectors where we just daisy-chain them
> together from the first RSA card.  We have the BIOS configured to use
> the serial port and we're using a decserver (700 or 900 depending on
> the site) for the consoles.

I admit I don't know much about the RSA / RSA II stuff -- will the RSA
II cards work like this too, or only the RSA cards?

Bryan