Fwd: Intel is doing something really stupid with RAID??

[Jim Asman]

--------------- Original Message ---------------
At 01:09P Thu Aug 30 2007, John Esak wrote:

Jim,
Can you send this to the list for me. I'm having rdns problems from this
location since we changed our T1.
Thanks,
John
-----Original Message-----
From: John Esak [mailto:john at valar.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2007 10:11 AM
To: filePro mailing list
Subject: OT: Intel is doing something really stupid with RAID??

Okay, does anyone own a ss4000e NAS solution?  This is a box that allows you
to put up to 4 drives in a small cabinet and build various types of RAID
across the drives. It works great, but there is something SO stupid about
it... we must be doing something wrong. Either that or the engineers at
Intel need a course in the most basic aspects of file system administration.

I've been building RAID systems since about 1989 or 1990 when we got
involved with all the various new brands of volume and striping managers
that were coming out at the time. It's not like I don't understand the
process or the methodology. I just wonder if Intel is missing something or
if I missed it in their administration software.

They take you through initializing the drives for the first time. You pick
your type of RAID. RAID 5 , or RAID 5 with a hot spare, or RAID 0 or RAID 1
or RAID 10, etc., etc. You pick this option and the number of drives to
include and it does the rest of *building the raid* which by the way takes
about 14 hours on a 1TB set of drives (250Gb each). In the RAID 5 format we
chose, this gives you the 750Gb of capacity and all is well with the world.

Now, step 2 the RAID is built in this RAID 5 configuration, and you now pick
the size of your file systems.... something on SCO which would be called
"divvy". It asks you to fill in the size of a couple of base file systems to
start with and labels them 'public' and 'home'. The home section is where
new users get their home dirs, and th presumably you can use the public for
anything else.
Okay, still fine so far. Let's say you pick 375Gb for the first file system
and 375Gb for the second. Off you and there is no space left on the RAID for
what they call a "backup" area for their own proprietary backup client.
Regardless, you hit the do it button and it now takes 14 (to 40) hours to
establish this RAID and then put the file systems in place.

Still good so far.

now, suppose you want to change the size of those file systems. You want to
divvy them up in a new way. On *any* system I've ever seen lo these 18
years... any group of disks and their RAID controller... any operating
system... anything whatever... you simply go through the divvy process
again, destroy what is there and make some new file systems. There is
ABSOLUTELY no reason on earth to completely rebuild the RAID again. The
striping is *already* done, the RAIUD is in place and running *optimally*.
You just go through the process of re-making your felsites the way you want
them and start over with your stuff. End of Story.

NOT SO WITH THIS Intel NAS box! For some unexplainable reason, it *forces*
you to pick which kind of RAID you want, RAID 5, RAID 0, etc., before you
get to go to the section on re-making your file systems (divvy)... and there
seems no way around this. Are we (am I) missing something????  The damn
thing takes *another* 20+ hours to re-stripe the RAID, *then* it puts on
your newly sized file systems and folders.

This is just beyond stupid. Once a RAID is built, there is no need to build
it again unless it gets degraded somehow. And, doing this is *not* an O/S
function... just a controller, i.e., RAID administration thing.

So, I'm sure we are missing something... some way to *bypass* the stage of
re-specifying a RAID type when it is already in place and on the drives. Or,
has Intel just implemented the world's dumbest RAID box?

By contrast, I have several Buffalo systems, several DELL systems, and many,
many privately built RAID systems currently working that do not work in this
brain-dead way. Are all these other companies and systems that much smarter
than Intel?

All of this is almost too hard to believe. The two operations should be
broken into two completely separate functions, build your RAID, build your
file systems... and never the twain shall meet.

Somebody needs to inform Intel of this??

John Esak



Jim 
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