Hi managers,
Sorry for the late summary, but I had a lot of work in my queue ;)
On Mon, 12 Jun 95 I wrote:
> We are planning to buy a RAID system (RAID level 5). The system should
> be an external
> subsystem with external RAID controller. The controller should support
> multiple hosts.
>
> Because we are looking for a really inexpensive solution, the Digital
> HSZ40 is not what
> we want. I found two external raid controllers:
> - CMD CRD 5000
> - IFT 3000
> are there any experiences with these or other controllers (reliability,
> scalability,...)?
Seems that I have to give some more details:
-the system shall be connected with a 3000/400
-next year it will be connected to a 1000/XXX _and_ to a Sun
So it _must_ be a scalable external controller.
There is one question left:
What about the decrease in read performance?
Thanks to those who answered so far:
wolfston_at_headlands.com wrote:
> The CMD does work but compared to the DEC product line is very very slow!
> ...
"Paul E. Rockwell" <rockwell_at_rch.dec.com> wrote:
> You didn't say what machine you are working on. If it's a PCI-based
> AlphaServer (like the 1000, 2000, and 2100), if you'd relax your
> "external" only requirement, then the RAID Array 230 (KZPSC) is a
> wonderful solution.
> Now available with a battery backup for the controller cache, as well
> as supporting up to 32MB of cache, the KZPSC supports up to 21 fast,
> wide SCSI disks. It'll really hum along... And it's cheap.
> As far as price goes, be careful what you compare against the HSZ40 -
> make sure you are making an apple-to-oranges comparision. Compare
> reliability (the HSZ40 support a dual controller environment, as well
> as hot swap of drives, non-volatile cache for safe RAID-5 caching),
> performance ( 6 SCSI buses to fan out the I/O load, non-volatile
> cache again for improving RAID-5 performance), configuration
> expandability.
golden_at_falcon.invincible.com wrote:
> I have tested the IFT 3000 (which goes by a couple of different
> names, depending on who is selling it to you). It is pretty good
> performance wise. The user interface is a little rough, but it
> works. I ran into one bug trying to make a RAID 0+1 set out of 6
> disks (it worked fine with 4 disks).
> You might also want to look at the Mylex DAC960S, scsi-to-scsi RAID
> controller. It offers similar performance to the IFT 3000 for RAID
> 5, costs about the same, and comes from a slightly bigger company.
gadbois_at_cyc.com wrote:
> One thing to note is that your performance is limited to single SCSI
> bus' speed if you use an external controller. A single disk these
> days can consume a large fraction of the available bandwidth, and
> this can be a real bottleneck if you have lots of disks.
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Received on Thu Jun 22 1995 - 16:12:42 NZST