All hardware (and software) sucks, and it breaks, it's a fact of life. No matter if you go with SCSI or SATA, the important thing is that you can find out when a drive dies so that it can get replaced.
Many low to mid range SCSI raid cards (most? all?) either don't have any sort of interface to find the raid status when the server is up (they just beep at you and expect that somehow that's going to be hard over the AC and server noises when you're walking by the machine), or the tools for checking the raid status are so poor that they'll lock up the shared memory segment after checking a certain amount of times (ADAPTEC, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Since being certain about your raid status means checking it via something like nagios, that means that it gets checked many times, and will thus eventually lock up.
While SATA is nowhere near the performance of scsi (despite what SATA fanboys will tell you), 3ware cards are actually really good at: a) letting you know when a drive has failed b) letting you check with their tools as many times as you want without locking it up
And since the SATA stuff is so much cheaper, you can buy multiple servers, so even if the card fails, you have a hot backup.
If you absolutely have to have the fastest, go for a raid 10 of 15krpm drives.
If you don't, and want peace of mind, get at least 2 SATA setups with 3ware cards.
We primarily use FreeBSD (and a few linux machines), and we have yet to find a RAID controller that makes us trust it, except for 3ware. IDE performance just isn't there yet, so we need SCSI.
The raid monitoring utility raidutil from adaptec would crap out after a while, leaving us with unmonitorable RAID units. The monitoring app for a well known FreeBSD only vendor doesn't work under unix, only windows.
The dell raids (rebranded adaptec I think) will lock up under heavy load.
Are there *any* decent mid-range SCSI RAID cards that:
a) allow for some sort of remote monitoring, can be via the OS/snmp/whatever b) Work under FreeBSD and Linux c) Don't die under heavy sustained load d) Support hot swap
http://www.zoneminder.com/ is a linux based security camera system. It detects motion and saves the jpgs when certain conditions are met. You can even have triggers for events, different kinds of zones that behave differently, and interface with X10 devices!
It is seriously great software, and 100% open source. There's even livecds (although not the latest version) so you can mess with it without installing anything.
I have it running under debian testing, and while there were a few quirks to installing it, it was generally pretty painless.
Yes, the market is saturated. People who are good, work hard, or extremely lucky will do very well, but there's lots of people who barely make beer money, and lots of others who lose a ton of money.
The days of easy money in online porn are long gone.
Troll eh? I hope that gets hit in metamod. It's not like I tried to hide the fact that I was linking to a sex site -- if you can't figure out that "sextracker" is porn related..
I starting working at a FreeBSD shop (flyingcroc.com, parent company of sextracker.com) coming from a linux background.
We do some pretty amazing things with freebsd.
We have tons of servers doing between 100-300 reqs/second with apache, others that have done 40-50Mbit sustained (on a 100Mbit NIC, Intel hardware), and all kinds of other crazy stuff.
I've ssh'd into various machines that were getting hammered and the load was in the 700s with disk/swap/ram/cpu all taking a beating, and I was still able to do what I needed. When I've dealt with linux machines under conditions nowhere near as bad as that, it was a total nightmare to even get logged in, let alone do anything.
I still use linux for my workstation, because I love the desktop goodies, games, and debian, but for high performance servers it's hard to beat freebsd.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the only reason I registered as well.
All hardware (and software) sucks, and it breaks, it's a fact of life. No matter if you go with SCSI or SATA, the important thing is that you can find out when a drive dies so that it can get replaced.
Many low to mid range SCSI raid cards (most? all?) either don't have any sort of interface to find the raid status when the server is up (they just beep at you and expect that somehow that's going to be hard over the AC and server noises when you're walking by the machine), or the tools for checking the raid status are so poor that they'll lock up the shared memory segment after checking a certain amount of times (ADAPTEC, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Since being certain about your raid status means checking it via something like nagios, that means that it gets checked many times, and will thus eventually lock up.
While SATA is nowhere near the performance of scsi (despite what SATA fanboys will tell you), 3ware cards are actually really good at:
a) letting you know when a drive has failed
b) letting you check with their tools as many times as you want without locking it up
And since the SATA stuff is so much cheaper, you can buy multiple servers, so even if the card fails, you have a hot backup.
If you absolutely have to have the fastest, go for a raid 10 of 15krpm drives.
If you don't, and want peace of mind, get at least 2 SATA setups with 3ware cards.
We primarily use FreeBSD (and a few linux machines), and we have yet to find a RAID controller that makes us trust it, except for 3ware. IDE performance just isn't there yet, so we need SCSI.
The raid monitoring utility raidutil from adaptec would crap out after a while, leaving us with unmonitorable RAID units. The monitoring app for a well known FreeBSD only vendor doesn't work under unix, only windows.
The dell raids (rebranded adaptec I think) will lock up under heavy load.
Are there *any* decent mid-range SCSI RAID cards that:
a) allow for some sort of remote monitoring, can be via the OS/snmp/whatever
b) Work under FreeBSD and Linux
c) Don't die under heavy sustained load
d) Support hot swap
It's getting very frustrating.
Zoneminder is great, it even has a live CD so you can find out how your hardware will work without having to find a drive to install it on.
I've been using it for about a year and am very happy with it.
http://www.zoneminder.com/ is a linux based security camera system. It detects motion and saves the jpgs when certain conditions are met. You can even have triggers for events, different kinds of zones that behave differently, and interface with X10 devices!
It is seriously great software, and 100% open source. There's even livecds (although not the latest version) so you can mess with it without installing anything.
I have it running under debian testing, and while there were a few quirks to installing it, it was generally pretty painless.
There's great support in the forums as well.
Yes, the market is saturated. People who are good, work hard, or extremely lucky will do very well, but there's lots of people who barely make beer money, and lots of others who lose a ton of money.
The days of easy money in online porn are long gone.
Troll eh? I hope that gets hit in metamod. It's not like I tried to hide the fact that I was linking to a sex site -- if you can't figure out that "sextracker" is porn related..
Ah well, such is life.
I starting working at a FreeBSD shop (flyingcroc.com, parent company of sextracker.com) coming from a linux background.
We do some pretty amazing things with freebsd. We have tons of servers doing between 100-300 reqs/second with apache, others that have done 40-50Mbit sustained (on a 100Mbit NIC, Intel hardware), and all kinds of other crazy stuff.
I've ssh'd into various machines that were getting hammered and the load was in the 700s with disk/swap/ram/cpu all taking a beating, and I was still able to do what I needed. When I've dealt with linux machines under conditions nowhere near as bad as that, it was a total nightmare to even get logged in, let alone do anything.
I still use linux for my workstation, because I love the desktop goodies, games, and debian, but for high performance servers it's hard to beat freebsd.