Replacing a Mylex AcceleRAID?

[Scott Long]

Andrea Venturoli wrote:
> Hello.
> A customer of mine is running a 4.x system with 5 or 6 SCSI disks, 
> operated by the aforementione controller in a RAID5 configuration.
> 
> Due to the obsolescence (and soon lack of support) of this version of 
> the OS, we are planning the upgrade to 6.x and he would like to change 
> the hardware too. In fact we are not to happy with this card: speed and 
> stability are very good, but the lack of any tool to manage the RAID 
> forces us to reboot. Besides, since Mylex seems to have gone out of 
> business, we must hope that controller never dies, or the disks would 
> not be accessible any more, would they?
> 
> So, I have a few questions:
> _ is support for this card (mly driver) improved in newer versions? Is 
> it working ok even on AMD64 platform? Are there any utilities to manage 
> it through the OS?

There hasn't been many changes to this driver in several years.  I
haven't tested it on amd64, and I know that it cannot reliably handle
 >4GB of RAM, so you'd be at very high risk if you used it.
There was a simple tool for querying status that was floating around a
few years ago (if I'm remembering the correct controller).  I can try
to dig it up if you're interested.

> _ how about going with software RAID? AFAIK there are graid3 (which is 
> not what we want, I guess) and gvinum, but I heard the latter is not 
> quite production ready and/or the documentation is not finished;
> _ any hint or recommendation for a replacement card which will possibly 
> stay on the market for a while and has an OS management interface?

Depends on what you're looking for.  Things have changed since the old
days of SCSI controllers.  Are you looking to stay with SCSI, or are you
looking to move to SATA?  What about SAS?  There are
cost/performance/reliability tradeoffs there.  A number of good choices
exist in each category, so you'll need to decide which direction to go
in.

Scott