Replacing a Mylex AcceleRAID?

[Andrea Venturoli]

Hello.
A customer of mine is running a 4.x system with 5 or 6 SCSI disks, 
operated by the aforementione controller in a RAID5 configuration.

Due to the obsolescence (and soon lack of support) of this version of 
the OS, we are planning the upgrade to 6.x and he would like to change 
the hardware too. In fact we are not to happy with this card: speed and 
stability are very good, but the lack of any tool to manage the RAID 
forces us to reboot. Besides, since Mylex seems to have gone out of 
business, we must hope that controller never dies, or the disks would 
not be accessible any more, would they?

So, I have a few questions:
_ is support for this card (mly driver) improved in newer versions? Is 
it working ok even on AMD64 platform? Are there any utilities to manage 
it through the OS?
_ how about going with software RAID? AFAIK there are graid3 (which is 
not what we want, I guess) and gvinum, but I heard the latter is not 
quite production ready and/or the documentation is not finished;
_ any hint or recommendation for a replacement card which will possibly 
stay on the market for a while and has an OS management interface?

I know this has probably been asked many times, but things tend to 
change over time, so what I found with Google might already be old...

  bye
	av.