Serious Dell Sadness - H200, H700, and H800

[Tom Daly]

All,

> However, we've been having serious ongoing problems with the Dell RAID
> controllers in the 11th gen series. The first card we tried, the H200,
> is supported by the MPS driver in HEAD. We compiled the driver into an
> 8.1 kernel, and we're able to detect disks configured as a JBOD. When
> we configured 2x 1TB disks into a RAID 1 volume, FreeBSD and the MPS
> driver didn't detect the disks.

I wanted to provide an update on some additional testing we've performed.

We've completed a test run a Dell R610 with an H800 connected to a Dell MD1220 disk shelf exposing a 12TB RAID volume to the OS. No observed RAID errors, timeouts or otherwise.

Subsequently, and on a hunch, we've tested FreeBSD 8.1 with the Dell H700 and the H800 on RAID volumes < 2TB. We've never been able to reproduce a failure to date. All of the failures we've seen to date occur when our RAID volumes are > 2TB. This makes me suspect of some kind of 64-bit LBA problem. We are going to complete all of our <2TB testing, then try another >2TB test to make sure we get a failure this week.

Our test configurations to date:

Dell R310 w/H700 and RAID 1 of 2x 1TB SAS 7.2k RPM
Dell R510 w/H700 and RAID 1 of 2x 600GB 10K RPM SAS + 3x RAID 10 of 4x 600GB 15K RPM SAS
Dell R610 w/H700 and RAID 10 of 4x 300GB 10K RPM SAS
Dell R610 w/H700 and RAID 1 of 2x 600 GB 10K RPM SAS + H800 to MD1200 with 6x RAID 1 of 2x 1.5TB 7.2K RPM SAS

Disk throughput is being tested using Bonnie++. IO performance on FreeBSD 8.1 vs. Debian Squeeze seems to be about 25% better, FWIW, on the <2TB RAID volumes.

Any thoughts, anyone?

Regards,
Tom

-- 
Tom Daly
CTO, Dynamic Network Services, Inc.
http://dyn.com/