[SunHELP] raid options for e250

[Andy Bastien]

I'm looking to put some RAID storage on a pair of E250s that I'm
taking care of.  The two systems are identical twins, and each
currently has two 36G drives that are apparently running of off the
on-board controller.

My first consideration was to purchase an additional 3 drives for
each, and use DiskSuite to do RAID 5 in software.  All the advice I've
see so far says "Don't do this; software RAID 5 is very slow!"  Can
anyone confirm or deny this claim?

The other option I've found as far as software RAID is to use
DiskSuite to mirror a striped set.  I've seen varying claims as to
what sort of performace I could expect from such a configuration, and
I'm considering this to be my last resort right now.

I started looking into getting hardware necessary to do hardware RAID
internally in the E250s, but I couldn't fine any.  The controllers
that I have been able to find want 68-pin SCSI connectors, and we have
an SCA backplane.  Are there any RAID controllers available that will
work with the existing SCA backplane that we have in these boxes?

So I'm now looking at finding rackmountable RAID subsystems.  The
prices that I've seen so far have been outside of our budget, with one
exception.  This exception is the Synetic SyneRAID800blue.  This unit
is a RAID subsystem that uses up to 8 IDE drives, and has two SCSI
channels for I/O to hosts.  Each channel can be attached to a separate
server and the available drive space divided between them.  The fact
that we can use one RAID subsystem for both servers is the real bonus,
because it divides the cost between the two and ends up being
relatively cheap (the whole rig would probably cost no more than
$4500).  I've seen a couple of other companies that seem to sell the
same system under different names, but other than those I haven't seen
anything else that's comparable.  Does anyone have any experience with
this system or anything similar?

Any other ideas or suggestions?