SAN we go (Storage Area Network)

HP has a good paper describing SAN technology.

Although this paper is pro-HP, i.e. describes how build SAN from HP provided components, it is a good source of concrete example.

(link)

A bit of russian :)

Неожиданностью называют то, что случается,
когда люди долгое время упорно не желают
замечать очевидного.
(Выловлено в каком-то форуме)

Adaptec RAID (Linux)

IBM x-series servers are shipped with Adaptec HostRAID, that supports RAID 0/1/10. It turns out that this "RAID" is regular AIC-7902B U320 SCSI controller, and RAID functionality is provided in driver (=software RAID!), i.e. you can use aic79xx driver and see all of hard disk separately, no matter how you've configured your "RAID" using Adaptec BIOS utility.

And here comes the fun part - If you want use your disks as RAID, you have two options:

1. Use general linux md driver - this looks like preffered solution, since I do not know how good that proprietary Adaptec driver (see below) is tested.
   
2. Use mystical a320raid driver "provided" by Adaptec. This driver is published under 'adaptec' license, i.e. its not OpenSource driver. Moreover, Adaptec does not publicly provide this driver for 2.6.x. kernels even in binary form. As far as I saw, SUSE SLES 9 and Mandrake provide this driver for 2.6.x kernels, but they can not be freely downloaded (and no src.rpm as well).

The bottom line is - HostRAID RAID solution announced on IBM x-series server (and surely many others) is a software RAID solution, unless you install additional hardware in special slot (IBM ServerRAID-7k I think)

Some links on the subject:

SUSE discussion
Mandrake rpm page

Have sweet nightmares...

Must die again :)

"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably

  the day they start making vacuum cleaners."

I'm starting to hate IBM X-Series servers.

Damn damn damn Adaptec HostRAID....

Gmail storage size has grown to 2300Mb... cool

I can hardly beleive that till beginning of the year I've used Hotmail. Hotmail provided 1mb storage in 1997 and 2mb storage in 2005. Holy joke...

Well, never thought I'll ever start blogging :)

Anyway, I do not know whether there will be any other thoughts... :)