HBA's was Re: [SunRescue] Excuse my gross oversimplification of RAID

[James Lockwood]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, Chris Byrne wrote:

> Anyone know of a place where I can get a PCI FC-HBA with internal and
> external connectors (preferably GBIC based), that supports intelligent
> RAID features and costs less than the down payment on a new car?

How do you define "intelligent" RAID?  Battery-backed write cache?
Onboard RAID-5 parity calculation?

> Actually while we're on the subject, I'm looking for a PCI RAID U160
> SCSI HBA, with internal and external connectors, at a reasonable cost
> for my U10.

Doesn't exist (with Solaris drivers).  If you're looking for a SCSI
solution for the low end PCI Sparcs (32-bit) then I highly recommend the
Symbios SYM22801 dual UW.  Driver support is excellent (it's the card Sun
ships), the cards are reasonably priced (relative to Sun list) and it will
be more versatile than a single U160 chain in terms of the number of
devices you can reasonably connect.

I have 3 of these cards in my fileserver (Sparc AXi) giving me 8 UW chains
including the 2 onboard.  Performance is excellent with the dual PCI
busses, I can push nearly 200MB/s aggregate _sustained_ through the
controllers. I use RAID 1+0 with a solid-state disk for fs journaling for
critical filesystems, RAID 5 with Disksuite logging for noncritical
filesystems and RAID 0 for scratch space.  I want to upgrade this machine
to an Ultra 30 so I can fit an SPC/S and do RAID 5 in hardware.

> I'm looking to upgrade the storage, and rather than waste cash on going
> to a bigger Ultra ATA drive, and an external only SCSI solution, I'd
> like to just switch to all SCSI inside and out.  

This is one of many reasons I prefer the Ultra 30 and AXi to the 5 and 10.

-James