Intel Xserve RAID Support?

We've abandoned plans to install Xserves, basically because there is no internal hardware raid support, no timescale for it and no information about if it is even possible.

Apple software Raid is notorious, SoftRAID appears not to support booting from Mirrored drives on Intel and Xserve Raids are not bootable, which basically means no acceptable level of bootable Raid whatsoever.

These machines are supposed to ready for enterprise or at least small businesses, they are clearly not.

We've been quoted around £7k for an HP DL385 with 8 drive bays and Raid 6 support; at about £11k for the closest we could get to this by adding an Xserve Raid into the mix (still with only Raid 5) Apple are absolutely no comparison.

Pretty disappointing all round.

I don't understand what you mean by "Apple software Raid is notorious."

I have booted Xserves off mirrored RAID sets for years without incident.

I know of a couple of instances of disk failure in one drive in the mirror and then the rebuild failing, basically destroying the whole set.

Perhaps it's just bad luck, and it's not that notorious, I don't know.
Still, I don't trust it personally and it's not Raid 5.

>I know of a couple of instances of disk failure in one drive in the mirror and then the rebuild failing, basically destroying the whole set.

I've never experienced this. Other than some flakiness in creating the initial mirror from an existing boot drive, most of which dates back to 10.3, Apple's RAID has worked well for me. The (very) few drive failures I've had haven't caused me any headaches, and I've not had any problems rebuilding mirrors.

The only problem case I've heard of was with a user who was trying to rebuild the mirror on the same drive that failed because he was somehow convinced the drive was still viable - "it comes up if I plug it into another machine". Can't help some people 🙂

I agree unfortunately with you ... the first tell tale sign was the absence of boot capacity from the macpro in August ... i asked during an Apple sponsored event about the problem and the ,Sales, Engineering, Product, Europe Department heads all coming from Cork Ireland mentionned they did not have at this point in time any solution to insure disk redundancy with an Xraid Xserve . Aka you cannot boot the system from FC which defeats the whole point of entreprise implementation.

At first my alarming posting was seen as a troll , since the xserves were not released at this point in time at all , then came the delays and calls to Apple Cork support department for Macos X server showed that as of October 15th they did not have a MacPro and Xraid setup to go with the proper tests and no recommandations could be issued at this point ... This was tied to the serialnumberd problem that did not work at all on the intel mac.

Some people suggest that we shall rely on the internal drives for system tasks only then pull of the users from the internal partition onto the Xraid as much as i go with that it will create bottlenecks regarding VM management and is far from creating a streamlined solution .. as to the hassles of deploying such a solution i don't want to hear about those.

At this point in time the solution is not ready , thats embarrassing since i run a mac centric company and would not want to switch onto anything else than macs.

Redundancy is Capital for any entreprise deployment.

absolutely it's a must for Xserve stability and safety. Xserve Raid support is essential for enterprise deplyment.

Is there any movement about this topic?

Apparently, there is still no hardware RAID support from Apple (or anyone else). I was trying to spec out & price an order for a new XServe this morning and I wasn’t aware of this issue until today. I must admit that I’m truly baffled by the lack of a hardware RAID option. Who buys a server these days without hardware RAID support? For me at, least this is a deal-breaker.

The XServe G5 that I purchased last year with the SATA RAID card is working wonderfully using a RAID 5 configuration. Buying another was a no-brainer... until this.

Does anyone have an interim solution, assuming that a RAID card will be available some day? The Apple Tech that I talked to this morning suggested using the 15K rpm SAS drives. He recommended mirroring two of them for data & using the third for the OS along with an external firewire drive to back it up.

I do something similar to this on my workstation now with no probelm, but I'm skeptical about the performance & reliablility of this solution on a server. The tech was unable to provide any performance data for this configuration.

I spoke to a rep at ATTO, who said he thought spring would be the release date for their SAS Raid card which would be compatible.
This was too late for us, so we scrapped plans for Xserves and went with HP/SuSe instead.
He didn't really have much more information on it though.

The other theory I've heard is that once Leopard comes out, ZFS will be a suitable replacement for Raid.

This seems a slightly dubious path to take with enterprise hardware if it turns out to be true, with zfs pretty new in the scheme of things.
It also doesn't help anyone who's been wanting to buy a usable Xserve in the last 4 months or so.

zfs:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf

PowerBook G4, Dual Core MacPro Mac OS X (10.4.8) PB: 128MB GFX, 1.5GB RAM, MacPro: 2x2.66GHz, 3GB RAM