Dell RAID controllers

I've been playing with Dell PERC 3/DC RAID controller in v20z server + ZFS. There's external JBOD connected on one channel with several disks in it. I decided to configure each disk as an RAID-0 so basically I got 1-1 mapping. Then using ZFS I created a pool in a RAID-10 config. It turned out that creating RAID-10 entirely in HW doesn't offer any better performance so doing it in ZFS has two main advantages - one is I got much better data availability due to ZFS checksumming and second advantage is that I can connect that JBOD to simple SCSI controller and just import ZFS pool. I have actually checked it by pulling out a disk with a ZFS pool on it and then putting the disk in another JBOD with SPARC server and simple SCSI adapter and I was able to import that pool without any problems.

Now performance - it turned out that if I disable Read-Ahead and set Write-Thru mode with stripe size set to 128k I get best performance. Any more logic enabled on controller and performance drops. So in an essence I treat that RAID controller as a SCSI card (I would use SCSI card but I do not have one free right now).

By default Solaris recognizes PERC 3/DC controller out of the box. However you can't change any RAID parameters from within Solaris - you have to reboot server and go into RAID BIOS which is really annoying especially if you want to tweak parameters and see performance changes - it just takes lot of time. Additionally with setup described above (1-1 mapping, no redundancy in HW) if one disk fails you can replace it with another one (I dedicated one disk a hotspare) but you can't replace failed disk online 'coz in such a config you have to into RAID BIOS and tell it you have replaced disk. There's however another solution - Solaris used amr(7D) driver by default with PERC 3/DC. If you tell Solaris to use lsimega(7D) driver instead (which is also delivered with Solaris) then you can use LSIutils package which gives you monitoring and what is most important it gives you ability to reconfigure RAID card on-the-fly from within Solaris. The utility just works.

All I had to do in order to force system to use lsimega driver instead of amr was to comment out a line 'amr "pci1028,493"' in /etc/driver_aliases and add a line 'lsimega "pci1028,493"'. Then reboot a server (with reconfiguration). The hard part was to find LSIutil package - thanks to Mike Riley I downloaded it from LSI-Sun web page.

ps. it's great that Solaris has more and more drivers out-of-the box. I belive it would be even better if Sun would include utilities like LSIutil also.