So at work we’re testing out building a new departmental storage cluster. Our needs, especially with regards to Manabe, our cluster, are still network I/O and CPU-bound, so it doesn’t need to be particularly fast, but we would like a single storage namespace, and we want it big. So, withe the combined research that my boss and I have done, we have decided the least unsucky option is to go with a OpenSolaris-based frontend (to use ZFS exported via NFS) with an iSCSI-over-gigabit ethernet SAN. This lets us transition the department over to the storage cluster with a minimum of fuss and grumble, and not worry about iSCSI connection drops due to the campus network repeatedly dropping out, which it does all too often.

So, to implement this SAN, we have currently 4 working chassis of 15 SATA drives each hooked up to 3Ware 9550 controllers. Our newest member, the 5th one, and the one we’re going to actually start the SAN with, is a new notion for us. It’s a 16 SAS drive server, with an LSI 8888 controller. So far, things haven’t been going so well; we started with an Adaptec card, but it was broken, so we got rid of it and are trying the LSI card, seeing the backplane chipset in the server is LSI as well.

However, this backplane apparently doesn’t officially “support” SATA, even though SAS allows for backwards compatibility. Trouble in paradise there. In addition, this LSI card has a command line interface management software called (imaginatively enough) “MegaCli”. This software… has problems. The interface is seriously brain damaged as the command line options suck hardcore… when they work as documented. Which I’m finding out doesn’t happen all the time. I’m looking at you, -PDInfo -PhysDrv. I spent nearly five hours today pulling my already thinning hair out trying to figure this out. It needs to get done sometime soon so we can get this array online, but how can I when it doesn’t work as advertised?

Categories: Geeky Peawee, Life of Peawee