Decent SCSI raid controller with CLI monitoring that doesn’t fail after a while?
We’ve tried many of the regular SCSI cards (lots of adaptec cards, mylex), and if they do have something that lets you check the raid status via the command line, it’s a proprietary binary that uses something asinine like shared memory, which will eventually lock up.
The problem is that most of the time when there’s a drive failure in a low to mid end scsi card, what it does is start beeping. That’s completely useless in a datacenter environment. So, what we need is something that we can monitor via netsaint/nagios to check the raid status every 15 minutes or so.
The adaptec raidutil command would work for a while, but then get itself into a state where you had to power cycle the machine to get it to respond, and this is obviously pretty sub-optimal.
The 3ware cards are great for this, but they’re IDE/SATA only, and anyone who says the performance is equal is misinformed. SATA is great for some things, but the speed (especially compared to 15krpm cheetahs) just isn’t there yet.
Working under FreeBSD is a bonus.
