Supermicro, you suck!
July 10, 2007 11:12 amSo, continuing the saga of the new storage cluster node, my boss figured out the problem with the MegaCli program. Both the syntax in the manual was wrong, and certain characters in the proper syntax needed to be quoted, otherwise the shell would try and do something with them.
Now, the next problem is our chassis, the SuperMicro SC836E1-R800V. It has what is known as a drive backplane; instead of each of the 16 drives attaching directly to a controller card, which is incredibly messy, the drives plug right into this backplane, and then the backplane attaches to the controller card with a single cable. Nifty, yes?
This chassis has a SAS backplane. SAS is the new storage technology for the new millenium. It works a lot like a normal network, and the industry specifications say it is to be backwards compatible with SATA, the current consumer-level drive interface, so that you can pack something full of cheap, huge drives (and huge SAS drives just don’t exist yet).
The controller chip on the backplane is an LSI SASx28, which proclaims its SATA compatibility long and loud. The controller card on the computer itself is an LSI 8888ELP, which says it’s a SAS/SATA controller. However, apparently, SuperMicro never took the time to ensure that their backplane itself is SATA compatible for one reason or another. And they only informed this of this fact after buying the $1,000 chassis, a $1,000 SAS controller, and $5,000 worth of SATA drives. We’ve been sending them nastygrams, and it looks like they might actually do something about it now, while really we wanted this storage in production by yesterday.
Grr.
Categories: Geeky Peawee, Life of Peawee
2 Responses to “Supermicro, you suck!”
As you may very well know, this is an industry-wide problem at the current time with all of the SAS controllers available on the market. While SAS controllers are supposed to be backward compatible with SATA drives, the reality is that they basically don’t work yet with SATA-II drives. Let’s hope that the industry gets its act together soon.
To begin with, your IP address appears to be registered with supermicro.com, which would indicate you work there or are otherwise associated with SuperMicro. I don’t mind that companies take the time to defend their products when those of us who work with their products complain about them, but let’s keep your origins honest. And just in case you’re not following up on this blog, I’m going to copy and paste you this in an email.
Moving on, why doesn’t anybody say any of this? By now, it’s almost assumed that SATA II is what is meant by SATA; almost all the new drives are SATA II these days, so what’s the point? I’d be far less grumbly about the chassis if it were clearly stated that SATA means SATA I. I don’t mind buying things that are a touch sub-optimal, but as an admin for a department with limited funding, we just can’t afford to buy things to try them and see if they work or not, and we can’t afford the package deals from Sun, IBM, or Dell for the amount of storage we honestly need.
It’s really disappointing to believe we’ve gotten under $1000 per TB, just to see that price double again just because of poorly designed, implemented, and advertised standards and hardware.
Care to comment?