Hardware RAID options on Xserve?

[Anonymous]

We’re building a new web hosting server and are considering purchasing a Xserve. I couldn’t find any info on the Apple site, but is hardware RAID an option? If not from Apple, could we add a Sonnet ATA card or alike, to give us RAID level 1 on two of the drives? What are the disadvantages to doing this? We currently run an OS X 10.2 Server on an older G4 for file server purposes, and find that software RAID on 2 pairs of mirrored drives really puts a load on the CPU. Plus I have read that if one of the drives dies, we cannot just put another in and rebuild.

Our budget is $3500US, so an Xserve RAID is not really an option. We’re also considering an IBM xSeries 345 and Dell PowerEdge 2650, both running linux.

[Anonymous]

There is no option for an internal hardware RAID on Xserve. You can’t install an ATA card for this because the drive modules can only connect to the Apple ATA controllers.

You can of course add a SCSI or FC card and attach an external HW RAID.

Regarding CPU load for SW RAID, on Xserve this is not significant. However, mirroring does reduce throughput (though not substantially). If you need maximum performance + redundancy, you have to go with an external HW solution, preferably level 5.

If a drive dies on Xserve with SW level 1 RAID, you have to take the volume offline. If it’s the boot volume, this of course means rebooting from another disk. So yes, it’s not optimal. Check out some of the third party solutions like SoftRAID or NX-RAID.

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