Re: Promise SATA and SuSE 9.1

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/19/04 

Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:43:36 +0200

Juhan Leemet wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 07:37:00 +0100, Alan Prescott wrote:
>> David Wright wrote:
>>> Alan Prescott wrote:
>>>> back up our windoze servers to using SuSE Linux and Samba...
> [snippage]
>>> I believe that the RAID on the onboard controllers are not real RAID's,
>>> but (Windows) software RAIDS (can somebody correct me on this point?)
>>> which aren't fully supported by SuSE. Reading between the lines, it
>>> would be better to format the drives individually and make a Linux
>>> software RAID.
>
> I'm not sure what's being suggested here? I thought the intention was to
> use a separate Linux machine as a backup/tape server to backup a different
> Windoze machine, not to mount Windoze drives on Linux? Then it doesn't
> matter whose RAID works how. The Linux machine would see a "logical shared
> disk" via smbclient (or some such) on the Windoze machine, whether it's
> plain disk, or any flavour of RAID. Windoze would interpret its own disk.
>

The problem is, from what I have read, that the so called "RAID" controllers
built into modern motherboards aren't real RAID controllers, they just
allow a limited amount of raiding under driver control from Windows, which
Linux can't use. (As a RAID controller costs from somewhere like 500UKP up,
and a motherboard with a "RAID" built in costs <200UKP, you can see that
the motherboard version is missing a great wodge of what is required to be
a RAID controller - like the controlling firmware I guess! Therefore,
although the drives could be raided under Windows using the correct
drivers, no such support exists under Linux as yet. Therefore the drives
will need to be individually set-up and a Linux software RAID created
AFAIK.

>>> for a relatively small company. Make sure you buy a proper server
>>> case with plenty of cooling capacity, especially around the drives...
>
> If this backup server is only used some of the time, you could also use
> power management to spin down the disks, to save power, heat, noise, etc.
>
>>> Also, consider if you need fault tolerance. A good server case will
>>> over redundant power supplies, but do you also need hot-swap...
>
> I wouldn't think that's necessary on a backup server? In fact, I've been
> wondering about the multiple power supplies thing. How often does the
> power supply fail? I suspect the multiple power supplies might be more to
> straddle different circuits on the power distribution? (so the cleaners
> can't crash your server when they unplug to plug in their vacuum?)
>

On our servers, we've had the occaissional power supply fail, it doesn't
happen often, but if the machine is mission critical...

>>> The difference between a desktop and a server is more than the number
>>> of disk drives and the configuration of the operating system. There is
>>> a good reason why servers cost several times what an equivalently
>>> specified (processing power and disk space) desktop would cost
>>> (although the asking prices of the Dell's, HP's and IBM's of this world
>>> still look steep even for servers...).
>
> I think some of the cost differential is "just because they can", and
> because (some? many?) people expect to pay more. I've always been annoyed
> that one cannot get SMP more than 2 CPU PC workstations. These magically
> become servers and cost as much as a car. I'm used to dealing with Sun
> SPARC machines, the differential there is not as high, but maybe because
> they are all more expensive? I buy them used so I don't notice that much.
>

Possibly. As I said, the servers do cost more because the components need to
be of the highest quality, but even so, some of the manufacturers are
taking the micky IMHO

<snip>

Dave

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