Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 at 22:09, Ali via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Happily for me I don't do stuff like build production servers any more, but my understanding is this: With modern hardware, it's easier, cheaper and more flexible to build and manage arrays in software, using modern filesystems such as ZFS, Btrfs, or MS Storage Spaces on Windows Server. I was recently documenting the use of Btrfs for this on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: the benefits of doing it in software are that you can dynamically migrate arrays between different RAID levels, add new drives and resize the array to include them or add them as additional parity disks on the fly, you can mark individual files as having different RAID levels (for example, you could place the OS' virtual memory space in a file on the RAID and tell the filesystem not to compute parity for it, just stripe it, for better performance). ZFS and Ceph allow for a mix of high-speed (e.g. SSD, NVMe, even NVDIMM) storage and low-speed but large rotational storage, and use the faster storage to cache the slower stuff. And of course, if your server dies, then the array can be mounted on any other box with the same OS and you can retrieve data from it -- which is far more difficult if a hardware RAID controller dies, in which case you might need the same firmware revision etc., and possibly onboard controller config info. Ceph now basically lets you build arrays of storage servers, so that you can, say, have single storage volumes comprising local storage in different countries, or on different continents, for local access speed and the software syncs it in the background between zones or regions. So it's no longer an array of physical disks on one server, it's an array of servers with disks in them -- and the servers and the disks may themselves be virtualised. It gets very complicated but it's also very powerful and flexible. Dedicated hardware just can't do stuff like this any more. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053