RAID Controllers and Linux: Ugh!

[Warren Luebkeman]

Coincidently I have ordered servers from Thinkmate before, they are who I used 
to use.  I may just switch back for that reason.  

It doesn't look like 3Ware has an SAS RAID card for sale yet.  However, from 
Thinkmate I can still buy SCSI cards (Bytespeed doesn't sell them anymore), 
so I could just go that route.  

Do you know if there are any significant performance differences between SCSI 
and SAS?

On Friday 29 June 2007 5:08 pm, Sarunas wrote:
> Warren Luebkeman wrote:
> > Since we are on the subject of servers, I am now dealing with an issue
> > that I always face when using a new server configuration:  Is the RAID
> > Card supported in Linux?  I usually like to go with Adaptec RAID cards
> > because they provide Linux driver sources so we can compile the driver
> > ourselves.
> >
> > This Intel board I'm looking at has a very impressive RAID controller
> > built right into it.  However, they only provide drivers for Redhat and
> > Suse.  Our system is based on Debian/Ubuntu, and we use a different
> > kernel.  So it would seem I cannot use this RAID controller, even though
> > it has "Linux" support.
> >
> > I guess this is more of a frustrated rant rather than a question.  It
> > looks like I will have to use the Adaptec card, which I have no problem
> > with, except that its about $400.  Just seems silly (and incredibly
> > annoying) to me.
> >
> > I'm wondering if you know of any hardware companies that sell server
> > configurations that have REAL Linux support, which basically means all
> > the hardware will work with any Linux distro, vs. just Redhat and Suse? 
> > It would be great to be able to order a server and not have to spend
> > hours determining if all the hardware is actually supported.
>
> Thinkmate has always agreed to test their systems with whatever Linux
> distro we asked, for example Debian unstable and Ubuntu pre-release.
>
> 3WARE controllers are true hardware RAID and the drivers are in Linux
> kernel.
>
> HTH,
> Sarunas Burdulis
> Sysadmin at Dartmouth Math Dept.
>
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-- 
Warren Luebkeman
Founder, COO
Resara LLC
1.888.357.9195
www.resara.com