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* Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 03:42 Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
0 siblings, 6 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Stacy White @ 2005-06-02 03:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: pgsql-performance
We're in the process of buying another Opteron server to run Postgres, and
based on the suggestions in this list I've asked our IT director to get an
LSI MegaRaid controller rather than one of the Adaptecs.
But when we tried to place our order, our vendor (Penguin Computing) advised
us:
"we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering find that
LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has found that
Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL -- they're using it as a preforce
server with xfs and post-gress."
Any comments? Suggestions for other RAID controllers?
^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 04:35 Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com>
parent: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
5 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Sven Willenberger @ 2005-06-02 04:35 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>; +Cc: pgsql-performance
Stacy White presumably uttered the following on 06/01/05 23:42:
> We're in the process of buying another Opteron server to run Postgres, and
> based on the suggestions in this list I've asked our IT director to get an
> LSI MegaRaid controller rather than one of the Adaptecs.
>
> But when we tried to place our order, our vendor (Penguin Computing) advised
> us:
>
> "we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering find that
> LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has found that
> Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL -- they're using it as a preforce
> server with xfs and post-gress."
>
> Any comments? Suggestions for other RAID controllers?
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
We use the LSI MegaRaid 320-2x with the battery-backed cache on a dual
opteron system that uses 8G of RAM. OS is FreeBSD amd64 (5.4) and runs
without hesitation. Database currently over 100GB and it performs
admirably. So chalk one anecdotal item towards the LSI column. To be
fair I have not tried an Adaptec card with this setup so I cannot
comment positively or negatively on that card. As a side note, we did
have issues with this setup with Linux (2.6 kernel - 64bit) and XFS file
system (we generally use FreeBSD but I wanted to try other 64bit OSes
before committing). Whether the linux issues were due to the LSI,
memory, Tyan mobo, or something else was never determined -- FreeBSD ran
it and did so without flinching so our choice was easy.
HTH
Sven
^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 05:00 William Yu <wyu@talisys.com>
parent: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
5 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: William Yu @ 2005-06-02 05:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: pgsql-performance
I've used LSI MegaRAIDs successfully in the following systems with both
Redhat 9 and FC3 64bit.
Arima HDAMA/8GB RAM
Tyan S2850/4GB RAM
Tyan S2881/4GB RAM
I've previously stayed away from Adaptec because we used to run Solaris
x86 and the driver was somewhat buggy. For Linux and FreeBSD, I'd be
less worried as open source development of drivers usually lead to
better testing & bug-fixing.
Stacy White wrote:
> We're in the process of buying another Opteron server to run Postgres, and
> based on the suggestions in this list I've asked our IT director to get an
> LSI MegaRaid controller rather than one of the Adaptecs.
>
> But when we tried to place our order, our vendor (Penguin Computing) advised
> us:
>
> "we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering find that
> LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has found that
> Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL -- they're using it as a preforce
> server with xfs and post-gress."
>
> Any comments? Suggestions for other RAID controllers?
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
>
^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 09:15 Andrew McMillan <andrew@catalyst.net.nz>
parent: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
5 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Andrew McMillan @ 2005-06-02 09:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>; +Cc: pgsql-performance
On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 20:42 -0700, Stacy White wrote:
> We're in the process of buying another Opteron server to run Postgres, and
> based on the suggestions in this list I've asked our IT director to get an
> LSI MegaRaid controller rather than one of the Adaptecs.
>
> But when we tried to place our order, our vendor (Penguin Computing) advised
> us:
>
> "we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering find that
> LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has found that
> Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL -- they're using it as a preforce
> server with xfs and post-gress."
>
> Any comments? Suggestions for other RAID controllers?
Hi,
We're using the Megaraid (Intel branded model) on a dual Opteron system
with 8G RAM very happily. The motherboard is a RioWorks one, the OS is
Debian "Sarge" AMD64 with kernel 2.6.11.8 and PostgreSQL 7.4.7.
Cheers,
Andrew.
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^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 11:50 Richard Welty <rwelty@averillpark.net>
parent: William Yu <wyu@talisys.com>
0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Richard Welty @ 2005-06-02 11:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: pgsql-performance
On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 22:00:09 -0700 William Yu <wyu@talisys.com> wrote:
> I've previously stayed away from Adaptec because we used to run Solaris
> x86 and the driver was somewhat buggy. For Linux and FreeBSD, I'd be
> less worried as open source development of drivers usually lead to
> better testing & bug-fixing.
Adaptec is in the doghouse in some corners of the community because they
have behaved badly about releasing documentation on some of their
current RAID controllers to *BSD developers. FreeBSD has a not-quite-free
driver for those latest Adaptecs. OpenBSD wants nothing to do with them.
richard
--
Richard Welty rwelty@averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking
Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
"Well, if you're not going to expect unexpected flames,
what's the point of going anywhere?" -- Truckle the Uncivil
^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 17:10 J. Andrew Rogers <jrogers@neopolitan.com>
parent: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
5 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: J. Andrew Rogers @ 2005-06-02 17:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>; pgsql-performance
I've got a bunch of mission-critical Postgres servers on
Opterons, all with no less than 4GB RAM, running Linux +
XFS, and most with LSI MegaRAID cards. We've never had a
single system crash or failure on our postgres servers,
and some of them are well-used and with uptimes in excess
of a year.
It may be anecdotal, but LSI MegaRAID cards generally seem
to work pretty well with Linux. The only problem I've
ever seen was a BIOS problem between the LSI and the
motherboard, which was solved by flashing the BIOS on the
motherboard with the latest version (it was grossly out of
date anyway).
J. Andrew Rogers
^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 17:42 Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com>
parent: J. Andrew Rogers <jrogers@neopolitan.com>
0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Joshua D. Drake @ 2005-06-02 17:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: J. Andrew Rogers <jrogers@neopolitan.com>; +Cc: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>; pgsql-performance
> It may be anecdotal, but LSI MegaRAID cards generally seem to work
> pretty well with Linux. The only problem I've ever seen was a BIOS
> problem between the LSI and the motherboard, which was solved by
> flashing the BIOS on the motherboard with the latest version (it was
> grossly out of date anyway).
At Command Prompt we have also had some great success with the LSI
cards. The only thing we didn't like is the obscure way you have to
configure RAID 10.
Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake
>
>
> J. Andrew Rogers
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives?
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org
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^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-02 17:47 Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>
parent: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
5 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Vivek Khera @ 2005-06-02 17:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: pgsql-performance
On Jun 1, 2005, at 11:42 PM, Stacy White wrote:
> "we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering
> find that
> LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has
> found that
> Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL -- they're using it as a
> preforce
> server with xfs and post-gress."
>
> Any comments? Suggestions for other RAID controllers?
>
I have twin dual opteron, 4GB RAM, LSI MegaRAID-2X cards with 8 disks
(2@RAID0 system+pg_xlog, 6@RAID10 data) running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE.
Works just perfectly fine under some very heavy insert/update/delete
load. Database + indexes hovers at about 50Gb.
I don't use the adaptec controllers because they don't support
FreeBSD well (and vice versa) and the management tools are not there
for FreeBSD in a supported fashion like they are for LSI.
Vivek Khera, Ph.D.
+1-301-869-4449 x806
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^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
@ 2005-06-03 07:37 Cosimo Streppone <cosimo@streppone.it>
parent: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
5 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Cosimo Streppone @ 2005-06-03 07:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>; +Cc: pgsql-performance
Stacy White wrote:
> We're in the process of buying another Opteron server to run Postgres, and
> based on the suggestions in this list I've asked our IT director to get an
> LSI MegaRaid controller rather than one of the Adaptecs.
>
> But when we tried to place our order, our vendor (Penguin Computing) advised
> "we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering find that
> LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has found that
> Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL
Probably, your vendor is trying to avoid problems at all, but
"one of our customers" is not a pretty general case, and
"we find LSI does not work well", but is there a documented reason?
Anyway, my personal experience has been with an Acer Altos R701 + S300
external storage unit, equipped with LSI Logic Megaraid U320 aka
AMI Megaraid aka LSI Elite 1600
(honestly, these cards come with zillions of names and subnames, that
I don't know exactly how to call them).
This system was configured in various ways. The final layout is
3 x RAID1 arrays (each of 2 disks) and 1 x RAID10 array (12 disks).
This configuration is only available when you use 2 LSI cards (one
for each S300 scsi bus).
The system behaves pretty well, with a sustained sequential write rate
of 80Mb/s, and more importantly, a quite high load in our environment
of 10 oltp transactions per second, without any problems and
`cat /proc/loadavg` < 1.
I don't like the raid configuration system of LSI, that is
counter-intuitive for raid 10 arrays. It got me 4 hours and
a tech support call to figure out how to do it right.
Also, I think LSI cards don't behave well with particular
raid configurations, like RAID 0 with 4 disks, or RAID 10
with also 4 disks. It seemed that these configurations put
the controller under heavy load, thus behaving unreasonably
worse than, for example, 6-disks-RAID0 or 6-disks-RAID1.
Sorry, I can't be more "scientific" on this.
For Adaptec, I don't have any direct experience.
--
Cosimo
^ permalink raw reply [nested|flat] 9+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2005-06-03 07:37 UTC | newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages (download: mbox mbox.gz follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2005-06-02 03:42 Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
2005-06-02 04:35 ` Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com>
2005-06-02 05:00 ` William Yu <wyu@talisys.com>
2005-06-02 11:50 ` Richard Welty <rwelty@averillpark.net>
2005-06-02 09:15 ` Andrew McMillan <andrew@catalyst.net.nz>
2005-06-02 17:10 ` J. Andrew Rogers <jrogers@neopolitan.com>
2005-06-02 17:42 ` Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com>
2005-06-02 17:47 ` Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>
2005-06-03 07:37 ` Cosimo Streppone <cosimo@streppone.it>
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