ICP Vortex GDT8546RZ vs 3Ware 9500S-4LP ... ?

[Oliver Brandmueller]

Hi.

On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 11:26:55PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> Just curious as to if ppl consider one better then the other, or are they 
> about the same?

Both are quite fast, both bring software.

We replaced our 3ware controllers since we had what seems a 
compatibility problem between the controller and out harddisks (Western 
Digital 74 GB 10krpm Raptors): Occasionally on the 3ware a random disk 
dropped out of our RAID 10. You had to remove power from the disk(!) 
first, to get it acknowledged again by the controller and then do a 
rebuild. This seems to occur only on very high I/O loads and we could 
not explicitly trigger it. Sometimes it happened twice a week in one 
machine, sometime it did not happen several weeks on all 5 machines with 
this setup.

We have no problem with the 3ware and other disks.

We have no problems with these disks on the ICP Vortex.


For the software:

3ware gives you a cli, which is quite handy when it comes to writing a
nagios plugin or doing the usual maintenance stuff.  The commands are
not straight forward in the first view, but it's easy to understand the
concept behind. The big pro here is, that you can handle everything even
in Shell scripts (you can just call the cli with the right commands, the
output is somewhat parseable). There's no generic way for SNMP access, 
though.

ICP comes with a management console (it's a curses interface, it's 
exactly the same as going into the controller BIOS on boot) and a 
management daemon. The management console (icpcon) is pretty straight 
forward, you can get a lot of information (like watching io rates on all 
the subsystems down to disk level, getting S.M.A.R.T. info and so on). 
This interface is not usable in a batch (like getting a status for a 
nagios plugin or so), you can write out an info file, which is hardly 
machine parseable. You have the daemon (srcd) to do the monitoring. 
The daemon can be connected by management consoles (so you don't need to 
logon the host to monitor or write the info file from), it can send SNMP 
traps and it can start commands in case of events. It cannot be queried 
by SNMP.


We're very comfortable with the ICPs now, but exchanging the slightly 
cheaper 3wares was mainly done because of the drive problems mentioned 
before.


- Oliver


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