[CentOS] Re: CentOS on Compaq Proliant Rackmount Servers

Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org>
Mon, 18 Jul 2005 21:28:20 -0000

From: Tony Wicks <tonyw at tonyw.com>
> Yes, the PE650/750 comes with the option of the Dell CERC (LSI logic,
> actually the 6 port card) card

Hmmm, now this gets interesting.
What microcontroller is on that board?
Is it this guy?

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/sata_150_6.html

That's an IOP302 (i960-66MHz or 100MHz?).
I'm always weary to thrown a yesteryear i960 at RAID.
The i960s really have a 50-60MBps throughput limit.

Granted, if you're going to do RAID-5, then it'll get you far
better performance than a 3Ware 8506 series at writes.

The 3Ware (let alone even software RAID-5) will kill it at reads,
but when it comes to writes, 3Ware 8506s won't break 30MBps
(and software RAID-5 will typically either do worse, or slam
your CPU-memory-I/O interconnect so hard it'll be busy with
nothing else).

I sure wish a tier-1 OEM put an XScale solution in, instead of
age-old i960 products.  Oh well, wishful thinking I guess.  ;->

> which is real raid and nativly supported on Centos3/4

LSI Logic (like their acquisitions Avansys and Symbios Logic) always
supported Linux quite extensively.  Despite i960 and standards like
I2O, some vendors *COUGH*Adaptec*COUGH* didn't make all of
their i960 products fully I2O-compliant and compatible with the
DPT driver (it was largely just former DPT products that were, or
DPT designs Adaptec took over).