hardware raid solutions?

[Eric S. Johansson]

David Abrahams wrote:

> Ready to be depressed about raid five?

thanks bud.  I don't have time to be depressed.  ;-) you've seen that 
list of things I want to get done in the open-source world.  What I need 
are slaves, coding slaves so I can focus on my plans to change the 
publishing world....

> 
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bonwick?entry=raid_z

actually, I did know about most of these failures and that's why I've 
been talking about isolated hardware controller with its own power 
supply for both controller and disk.  If the isolated controller detects 
the host going away, then it can write out all of the different bits of 
data necessary to keep the raid five intact.  But as the article points 
out, this is a moderately expensive proposition.


> 
> Despite http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051117-5595.html, I
> don't think ZFS is available for linux :(
> 
> But if you can wait a few months...
> 
> http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/2006/05/announcing-zfs-on-fuselinux.html

I just read up about that and baby oh baby, does that looks sweet.  if 
I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing, it is a good chance we can eliminate 
mdX and maybe, just maybe eliminate LVM.

I may just take a bunch of crappy discs from the basement and a Pentium 
II I have lying around and test this puppy with some sort of exercising 
tool.

the big question would be how to partition an existing system so that 
you could boot, get the right configuration files and then start 
working.  It will definitely take some planning.

--- eric