Suggested RAID cards for FreeBSD 5-RELEASE and 6-RELEASE

[Tom Daly]

Hi,
This seems to be an often posted topic on this list, however, its seems 
everyone's milage tends to vary. My inquiry:

We are trying to validate a hardware platform for our server farms. Our 
goal is to locate a server/RAID controller pair that satisfy's the 
following requirements:

Provides RAID levels 0, 1, and 10.
Provides for management via BIOS over Serial Console Redirect
Provides for management via OS CLI or GUI (but no X-Windows, should be
 	able to run through a standard shell)
Provides logging ability for events to syslog, e-mail, or logfile

Our last successful deployment was using the Intel SE7501WV2 Motherboard, 
with the Intel SRCZCR RAID controller. However, Intel has discontinued 
both of these projects.

In our testing, we've tried the following, and come up with these results:

Dell PowerEdge 2850 with Dell PERC4e/Di:
 	Provides required RAID levels
 	Management via BIOS over serial mostly works
 	Management via OS (MegaRC) seems broken
 	Logging (MegaMon) works

 	Both of the programs MegaRC and MegaMon 
http://people.freebsd.org/~emoore/MegaRAID_SCSI/

Dell PowerEdge 2850 with Adaptec 2130SLP
 	Provides required RAID levels
 	Management via BIOS over serial works
 	Management via aaccli works
 	Logging could be accomplished with aaccli and script files, but I
 		see nothing to directly accomplish this.

Intel SR7520JR2 with Intel SRCS16 (SATA)
 	Provides required RAID levels
 	Management via BIOS over serial is not possible
 	No OS Tools found for logging or management

 	Any of the Intel software stack 2 cards would appear to have this
 		problem.

We're considering a trial of the 3ware cards. Thier software support 
appears to be pretty good, however, I'm concerned about this recent post 
to this list:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-scsi/2006-January/002203.html

The Dell 2850 seems to have a slew of other problems, namely with memory 
and such, but it still seems like a viable candidate. Does anyone have any 
stellar FreeBSD + Hardware RAID success stories, somewhat akin to my Intel 
WV2 + SRCZCR experience?

In the Fourth Quarter 2005 FreeBSD Status Report, a section titled "LSI 
MegaRAID improvements" was included. Does anyone know if this includes the 
rebranded OEM/Dell controllers? Furthermore, has anyone gotten the 
LSI-provided management apps to run, as stated in the article? Are they 
native apps, or must they be run under linux compat mode?

Thanks for your input,
Tom Daly

-- 
Thomas J. Daly
tom at dyndns.com
Dynamic Network Services, Inc.
http://www.dyndns.com/