[geeks] Recommendations for RAID

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 10:16:22AM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> Hi everyone.  I'm looking for one of two possible solutions to a  
> problem.  I have a Sun A5200 and 22 300GB FC-AL hard drives.  I need a  
> raid controller to talk to them.  The optimal setup would be a  
> multichannel FC-AL RAID controller that sits in a PCI-X or PCI-Express  
> connector.  The second option would be an external box that talks over  
> multiple FC buses to the A5200 and performs all RAID functions, and  
> talks over a couple of FC buses to the host.
>
> Any suggestions as to which device would work for me?  My OS is NetBSD,  
> so any internal RAID card would have to work there.  I suppose the best  
> would be the Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000, but it seems to have been  
> discontinued, and I can't find one.

I think you should settle for an external raid controller.

What you do is find an appropriate PC or SPARC and populate it with 1-2x
4Gb FC-AL cards, and 2x FC-AL cards (or 1X dual port card) of whatever
speed your drives are. You then install OpenSolaris.  You setup your
drives as a raidz, raidz2, or whatever you prefer.  You then then export
that out the 4Gb interface using comstar to your host machine.