in the last couple of months we have had some serious customer problems with Embedded Raid, these are heightened by the lack of knowledge of hp frontline support. An ML310 G5 server didnt work with small business server 2008 and hp's solution was to install server 2003. Not exactly inspiring. Anyway the fix was simple, but required some serious searching - the driver isnt correctly listed on the HP website! http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1263898255442+28353475&threadId=1393617
other problems we had also involved a firmware bug that mistakenly marks disks as failed in raid.
A very good bit of advice is to use a separate raid card. This allows:
1. if the server dies you can replace the motherboard without having to reconfigure the raid (HP engineers usually don't understand onboard RAID is configured on the motherboard) its also posible to..
2. transplant drives and card to another machine in extreme emergency
3. better driver support - by default there will be raid drivers for different operating systems operating systems - finding embedded drivers is often difficult.
4. better reliability - raid cards are tested more thoroughly as thats what they do!
5. better throughput - raid cards will often have specialist chips e.g. XOR
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
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