Hi,
I was pointed to a company called ZERO-D (www.zero-d.com) who makes an
IDE/SCSI RAID which works under Tru64. Transtec (www.transtec.co.uk) sells
this RAID apparently under their own brand. It's called "Transtec 5000 IDE
RAID-System" and can be had in 6-bay or 8-bay versions.
So we will buy an 8-bay version and only use 3 disks in the beginning.
Thanks to the following people for their replies:
Chris Wigglesworth <C.Wigglesworth_at_open.ac.uk>
Rolf Habing <r.j.habing_at_canterbury.ac.uk>
Sean O'Connell <sean_at_stat.Duke.EDU>
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com
I'm appending their replies followed by my original posting.
Thanks again // Tom
-------------------------------- REPLIES ---------------------------
From: Chris Wigglesworth <C.Wigglesworth_at_open.ac.uk>
Tom,
We have been testing an Infortrend (Zero-D) RAIDkit ZD-400AV configured
with 6 IBM 75Gb 7200rpm IDE disks. This unit is also sold by Transtec:
http://www.zero-d.com/ide-scsi2.htm
http://www.transtec.de/adb/WWW_cat.main.plp/sid=039894FC6XX64C3A?Z/E/E/E/chap%3Braiide/YYSYLNY
The unit has two controller firmware options, one is billed as simple and
allows a single RAID set and partition, the other allows multiple logical
partitions on multiple LUNS or SCSI IDs.
We have been testing it with the more configurable controller firmware
version 2.2w on Tru64 4.0f pk4 and Tru64 5.0a. On both operating systems a
single RAID set presented as a single drive has worked without problems,
however using multiple partitions with multiple LUNS or SCSI IDs has led
to errors causing both operating systems to crash.
In general we have been happy with the device's performance when
configured as one big drive used by advfs, but bare in mind we have only
been testing for a couple of weeks. The unit is certainly easy to set up,
and another identical unit with have running on an intel box (FreeBSD) has
run flawlessly for 18 months.
I hope this info is of some use, and please don't hesitate to ask for any
more.
Cheers Chris.
Chris Wigglesworth
Physics and Astronomy Department
The Open University
UK
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Rolf Habing <r.j.habing_at_canterbury.ac.uk>
Tom,
I've been looking into this as well, but haven't implemented anything yet.
I found one SCSI/RAID system in the Transtec (www.transtec.co.uk) catalogue.
Transtec does mark it as being compatible with TruUnix.
They call it:
transtec 5000 IDE-SCSI RAID
The base model in their catalouge comes with 6 28.5Gb drives, and costs
around 3350 GBP.
>From the transtec home page, follow the link to Storage. You'll see the 5000
halfway down the page.
Hope this helps,
Rolf Habing.
Systems and Networking
Canterbury Christ Church University College
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sean O'Connell <sean_at_stat.Duke.EDU>
Thomas-
We bought a Zero-D AV-400 scsi <-> ide raid box. Cute litte
burgundy minitower with 6 1" bays and ATA33 controllers in it
hooked up to a i960 based RAID. It presents itself to the host
as a disk of size N (6 20GB in RAID5 -- 100GB harddrive) to the
host. I haven't hooked up to a Tru64 box, but it works fine
with FreeBSD.
All of the RAID configs can be done with a few button pushes on
the front of the unit (or via a serial console and kermit). Alos,
it comes with redundant power supplies and I bought ours with
64MB of cache.
I believe that Zero-D (
http://www.zero-d.com) has a new 8 bay
job with ATA66 controllers and LVD scsi.
Sean O'Connell sean_at_stat.Duke.EDU
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com
RAID-5 might be a slightly better choice for so much
capacity. It being read-only (or capable of being
read-only) you needn't worry about the RAID-5 write
performance problem. And, when a disk does fail, you
can still access the storage, rather than have to
rebuild a given file system from scratch.
-------------- O R I G I N A L P O S T I N G -----------------------
Subject: IDE/SCSI RAID on Tru64 anyone?
Hello,
We want to bring about 300GB of data on-line. The data's currently stored
on numerous CD-ROMs. After considering the current CD-ROM tower prices, we
figured out that a cheaper option is probably to use multiple IDE drives
in a RAID-0 configuration, as 75GB IDE drives go for about US$650.
I know that there are external RAID systems which internally employ IDE
drives but have a U2W SCSI interface to the host computer.
Question: Is anyone using such a RAID system on a Tru64 system? If yes
which brand/model? Any other comments anyone?
Thanks a lot // Tom
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Received on Tue Aug 08 2000 - 14:55:17 NZST