external raid arrays

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 10:53:43AM -0600, Chris Black wrote:
> We are looking for an external RAID solution that will provide at LEAST 
> 100MB/s read bandwidth, probably under RAID 10 (0+1). So far I have been 
> disappointed with performance for external raid arrays that we have 
> looked into, and I haven't found a good site with actual benchmarks 
> for external raid arrays. So I'm using the list :)
> I know some of you probably have some experience in high performance 
> external raid solutions so I'm asking for tips, suggestions, links, etc.
> I don't care if it is an Ultra160 connect or fibre channel, but I have 
> no experience with fibre channel and don't know about compatible cards 
> with linux.
> Our budget isn't quite in the EMC range, but I still figure there is 
> something out there that someone on this list might know about.
> All replies appreciated. Thanks in advance!

How much space do you need ?

Why not simply mocking 12 SCSI disks in an internal enclosure, using
four LVD Ultra80/160 adapters, running RAID 0+1 over that ?

You could use Software RAID for good performance, all you'd need to do would be
to get a motherboard which has more than one PCI bus (133MB/sec marketing
bandwidth is a little close to 100 MB/sec).

Upsides:  Cheap controllers, standard cabling, simplicity.
Downsides: Max. 12m cable length (AFAIR),  get's compilcated with *many* disks

This solution would be pretty much lower than anything rhyming with EMC,
but please tell us more about what you need.

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:   jakob at unthought.net   : And I see the elder races,         :
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