[nycbug-talk] Fibre Channel, RAID, free hardware, oh my!

[Charles Sprickman]

Hello all,

I've acquired some stuff that got me excited, and then got me depressed...

-dual 2.4 Xeon box, Intel mainboard
-Mylex ExtremeRAID 3000 dual-channel fibre channel RAID controller
-3 NetApp filer shelves w/1.5TB

My first thought was "new mail server!".  I was going to grab two shelves, 
throw FreeBSD on here and start building something sans Adaptec SCSI RAID 
to replace what we've got.  Things were looking good, the machine booted 
(into W2K) and saw all the arrays.  Occasionally on a cold boot the Mylex 
card would complain about an invalid config in nvram, but it would boot 
fine after a reset.  That made me nervous.

After more screwing around, I noticed that I was no longer getting the 
"alt-r to enter raid config" bios message on boot.  Long story short, 
looks like the card is toast and the flash is somehow corrupted.  No 
matter how many times I flash it, no-go.

So there are really no new FC RAID cards that are supported by FreeBSD, 
but I've still got a nice server and 1.5TB of disks.

I'm considering getting a Qlogic or LSI FC card (with no RAID), but I'm 
really lost on what the state of software RAID in FreeBSD 6 is these days. 
I don't want RAID5, just 1+0 (striped + mirrored).  I've used ccd in the 
past for a news server (just striping), and briefly toyed with Vinum (and 
ran screaming from it).

The handbook only mentions those two options, but I've heard that 
RAIDFrame was being ported and that there was something in GEOM.  Is there 
anything out there that's production quality?  Would you trust a few 
thousand mailboxes to it?  Am I being unfair to Vinum?

Just looking for some input...

Thanks,

Charles