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Sun Unveils RAID-Less Storage Appliance
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 10, 2008 05:26 PM
from the testing-the-cutting-edge-of-data-storage-sounds-less-than-fun dept.
from the testing-the-cutting-edge-of-data-storage-sounds-less-than-fun dept.
pisadinho writes "eWEEK's Chris Preimesberger explains how Sun Microsystems has completely discarded RAID volume management in its new Amber Road storage boxes, released today. Because it uses the Zettabyte File System, the Amber Road has eliminated the use of RAID arrays, RAID controllers and volume management software — meaning that it's very fast and easy to use."
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Submission: Sun Unveils RAID-less Storage Appliance by Anonymous Coward
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Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?
Unless I'm misunderstanding this hardware, the entire idea is to move data safety away from hardware redundancy toward software-driven duplication. In that way, the data is safe from failure in the same way that GoogleFS protects against individual machine failures. The only difference is that Google probably doesn't pay $11,000 for 2TB of storage. :-/
One of these days, I really will understand why Sun regularly shoots themselves in the foot. Until then, I suppose I must trust them to somehow find a customer who's willing to pay exorbitant prices for an otherwise good idea. (i.e. I'd really love to see Sun bring Google-style reliability from unreliability to the market.)
BTW, here's the link to Sun's marketing on this:
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/index.jsp [sun.com]
It's actually pretty cool tech. Sun could own the market if they just understood how the market views pricing and features.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose I must trust them to somehow find a customer who's willing to pay exorbitant prices for an otherwise good idea.
Have you worked with any of Sun's customers recently? I believe P.T. Barnum was involved in the development of their business strategy.
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You're missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
This is meant to be 100x faster than the storage you're talking about:
First [sun.com]: This uses Hybrid Storage Pool:
The Hybrid Storage Pool combines DRAM, SSDs, and HDDs in the same system, dramatically reducing bottlenecks and providing breakthrough speed.
Second [sun.com]: The system's hybrid architecture gives you the speed and performance you need to shatter the I/O bottlenecks with no administrator intervention. In fact, Hybrid Storage Pools with SSDs can improve I/O performance by 100x compared to mechanical disk drives.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't charging enterprise prices for simplified hardware
> that relies on commodity software solutions, kind of defeat the point?
Yea, that is amazing. Ya could put in a pair of 1U servers with RAID1 on each for a fraction of that pricetag. Use any of a number of ways to make the two units cluster, including using OpenSolaris and you get everything they are selling except the pretty front end for about half the sticker, Go SCSI/SAS on all of the drives in 2U machines
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:4, Informative)
Is that 2U 1M IOPS unit racked right next to your 1U, 64K core, 1024 TeraHertz system?
FYI, a loaded HDS 9990V (i.e. hundreds of spindles and multiple gigabytes of cache) manages to provide 200,000 IOPS (SPC-1). Even Texas Memory Systems RamSAN 400 (i.e. SDRAM) can only make 400,000 IOPS. Hell, it was only a couple of weeks ago that TMS was announcing that they sold a RamSAN-5000, which is the only storage device I've ever seen specced to 1,000,000 IOPS. And it's 10 different RAM cached, flash backed units.
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Sounds like apples to oranges comparison (Score:4, Informative)
to me. Coming from high performance transaction processing land where an operation means 'the data is ON the platter' you can't do that more often than the platter rotates to the point where the head is over the sector where the write operation starts. Basic math, 15k RPM spindle = roughly 300 times/sec. Multiply by however many spindles you got, that's what you're max throughput is.
This is one reason why IN THEORY at least an SSD would be so great, that latency is much less. So basically I'm thinking they just aren't talking about what you're talking about, and maybe that makes sense, if you're running a trading operation say, you just DO NOT CARE what is buffered someplace, if it isn't physically on the drive, it doesn't exist.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You, sir, are never allowed anywhere near my data centers!
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's a nice little department file server that you specced out there.
Sun targets a *slightly* different market with their device (think: databases, mission critical, pink slips).
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're driving 48 SATA drives on one bus, you're:
A) Not looking at the minimum 11.5TB layout
B) Not paying $35,000
C) Not a small-business customer
Which brings me back to: Sun is promising to target the small business and yet totally missed the mark. This is Enterprise hardware.
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:4, Informative)
Just a comment about the 48 disk setup; it is not always about getting the most space, but often about getting fastest response time. In this case the important factor is the amount of spindles. 11.5TB divided on 48 disks would be ~240GB a disk. Many companies would want 48 70GB disks as they are not in need of more space, only faster response times.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Small Businesses are businesses that make under $25M/year by definition. I can imagine small businesses being in the market for inexpensive, high throughput, SANs.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's that expensive.
I use Promise's VtrakJ610s at work (16x1TB SATA), and it cost about half that - but I still need a server for it (DL385 in our case). And I need to fit the disks myself (16x4 countersunk screws...) into the ultra-cheap harddrive containers.
A MSA70 full of SAS-disks (25) costs 10k, IIRC - but you need a server, HBAs etc.
I'm soooooo sick of the "I could build one for XXX% less using YYY"-comments.
Please, all the winers: go and start your own company selling and supporting storage-systems.
Good night and good luck....
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Funny)
It's SUN.
They're goal is to stay relevant, their strategy is to make headlines.
It's like a cross between a child acting up for attention and an emo cutting themselves.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the entire idea is to move data safety away from hardware redundancy toward software-driven duplication
You are exactly right. When you pay the exorbitant price, you pay for great hardware, the development of great software (which you could have gotten for free), the convenience of a prepackaged solution, and for the hardware and software support.
Should anything happen to these machines, you can always get your data back. If you can't afford another set of machines like these, simply plug the drives into anything that runs Solaris (or generally ZFS), and you have your data.
Just because it's open doesn't m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you put it together and test it using slave labour, you're not getting much change from $11k.
Sure, you could just plonk three 1.5T Seagates in there, shove a RAIDZ over it and call it a day, and that would
Hate to be the one to tell you all this... (Score:3, Insightful)
But SUN is FAR from being the inventor of charging people $50k for something they could just as well get for free...
Name ANY big IT vendor, they all do it. My father can tell some amazing stories on that subject. Not a new phenomenon either.
Now, if you are the GOVERNMENT, they'll give you the special bonus public sector price, $150k!!!
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Insightful)
With the same level of assurance that the solution will operate, first time - every time?
With the same level of confidence that Some Vendor will bend over backwards to fix it if it doesn't work?
Will your solution be as well tested and engineered?
It's not like you can just grab 3 1TB SATA drives, throw them into RAID-5 and say that you've got 2TB of production ready storage. Well, you can, but you'd be an idiot.
Your "home brew" solution will not meet any of the objectives Sun are achieving with this product. Your spindle count will suck, so concurrent access will be slow. You will probably be limited to one of iSCSI, CIFS, NFS or WebDAV, I doubt your solution would have all - and if it does, the integration will suck.
Will your solution have the diagnostic tools that Sun can provide? Oh wait, you don't have the millions of dollars to invest in engineering quality diagnostics, right from disk analysis (Sector scanning, remapping, etc) through to performance related faults? Well, then your solution will suck. What about snap-cloning?
In short, yes - storage is cheap. You can grab large drives very cheaply and put together something that works. That does not mean it will be good. Production quality storage is expensive, and for good bloody reason.
As for doing this using SSD storage, that's just ridiculous. 2048GB of storage would be at least 16 128GB SSD disks - this is not counting any disks for redundancy (i.e, raid-5/6 parity), or hot-spares. Assuming 2 drives for RAID-6 parity and 2 hot swaps, you'd need 20 SSD disks - with 10 grand, you're expecting to pay $500 per disk - and no other hardware, i.e, motherboard, case, cooling (more important than you think), etc.
So, until you have a clue about designing production quality storage systems, please refrain from making statements you have no clue about, you're only serving to confuse those people who are actually interested in what this product has to offer them. Keep to building crappy 3 or 4 disk RAID-5 systems using extremely large drives for storing your music, movies and pr0n on, but don't ever ever ever ever think about using those in any situation where your financial livelihood depends on that data.
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay perhaps not with SSD.
I've built 1.5 TB systems over a year ago, RAID for $1200. FULL including swappable drives, gig ethernet and plenty 2 GB of ram to cache the system. They are FAST and reliable. They worked FIRST TIME, and have worked exactly perfectly for 1.5 years. Drives fail, we have hot swaps available. While not quite 2 TB, they are also 1.5 years old now, and I'll be replacing them in another 1.5 years with bigger drive systems.
And these, will be spares and lower priority sytems when I update them with newer stuff in a year or two.
Expensive Technology for the sake of all that other stuff you listed is just silly. It is exactly why SUN doesn't get it, and why some pointy hair boss is buys the bs.
Production quality storage means that it works for the time needed. I've actually had WORSE reliability from Name brand "Server" quality stuff. We've got HP Proliant Servers in production, and at least THREE from three different lots have all failed due to MOBO Failures. While they do send out a tech to replace the MOBO, it is really really annoying to have to tell people that the server is down because the MOBO failed. And all the great diagnostic tools HP has on those servers didn't predict nor would they fix the errors.
You can build it 1/2 as much then you can easily have two on hand, in case one dies.
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Interesting)
We've got HP Proliant Servers in production
Some things you should keep to yourself no matter how bad it operates ;)
This is a real case of quality, support and "bling" factor. To use a (bad) car analogy: There is no need to buy a Mercedes when you can own a Nissan for half the price and it has exactly the same features (it may even be more powerful in some cases). However anyone can drive a Nissan (or can afford to), so there is a certain bling factor to driving the Mercedes. Just like there is a hell of a "bling" factor to owning Sun equipment as opposed to the "hack job" we can all put together. Personally I would prefer to spend twice as much and know that it's no longer my problem, even if it crashes, but that's just the opinion of one Network Admin.
Completely off hand: I've never had a mobo fail in any server, IBM or Dell based.
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure.
Heck, I'll even throw in the same vendor!
Even better. It will have had the same testing and engineering, PLUS a pre-existing history of operating in the marketplace.
I give you, the Sun Fire X4500 Server [sun.com]:
12TB (48x250GB) - $23,995.00
24TB (48 x 500GB) - $34,995.00
48TB (48 x 1TB) - $61,995.00
Let us compare with Sun's new line, shall we?
11.5 TB (46 x 250GB) - $34,995.00
22.5 TB (45 x 500GB) - $71,995.00
44.0 TB (44 x 1TB) - $117,995.00
So... twice the price for the same storage? To steal a line from a very famous "programmer":
Brillant
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
12TB (48x250GB) - $21,995.00 [sun.com]
and is virtually identical to the new 7210 box (config with 48x250GB) that sells for $34,995.00. Therefore proving that the same hardware is sold at a 60% markup ! Someone mod the parent up, he laid out the perfect counter-argument to the GP.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's exactly what Google and many others do, and they spend their money, and significantly less than this, on managing that storage effectively. It works. When it boils down to it, you can have all the exorbitantly expensive and brilliant 'enterprise ready' tools you want but the bottom line is you need redundancy - and that's pretty much it.
Sun say they are targeting small businesses, and they have lost already with this poor showing. They have advanced no further than when they stiffed all the Cobalt Cube customers and withdrew the product, who then went out and bought Windows SBS servers ;-). If you think people are going to jack them in for this then you need a stiff drink.
Ahhh, shit. I'm heart broken. What I'd like to know is how a small business will handle a behemoth like that, how they'll fund the electricity for all those drives and who'll manage it all. I expect that will be an ongoing cost to Sun support ;-).
I have news for you. People have been doing it for years, and the reason why Sun's business has gone down the toilet to commodity servers, Linux and Windows, especially with small businesses, for the past ten years is exactly for this reason.
Sun need to stop pretending that they can package up some commodity shit with some features very, very, very, very, very few need (and is waaaaaaaaaaaaay outside their target market) and label it as 'enterprise ready', which they think justifies an exorbitant price tag and ongoing support. They lost with this strategy with x86 and Solaris where they tried to protect SPARC, they lost with the exodus from SPARC after the dot com boom and they will keep on losing.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For most companies, the "cheap crap" is more than adequate.
They simply don't have the money to spend and they get by
perfectly well despite not having drunk the cool-aid.
Also, overpriced hardware with the label "enterprise"
plastered on it is not going to do anything to prevent
the need for a multiple data centers. Overpriced enterprise
hardware and multiple data centers solve different problems.
Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Sun shoots, and... well, you already know. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice. How's the replication work on that rig you just built? And how many IOPS you getting? And how quickly will your vendor bring replacement hardware to you? How many filesystem snapshots can you take with your fancy ICH9 supporting linux? You gonna back that up over NDMP? How's the thin provisioning working out for you there? How much data you pushing through those two slots? Where's the other 2 gig ethernet ports. You got hot swappable power supplies there? After you're done stuffing all that gear onto your mobo, how many pcie slots you got left for future growth?
No offense, but try and get some clue as to what it takes to have a commodity class storage appliance.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You forgot the SSD's for ZFS secondary ARC cache. Oh, and the server.
No RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
"All of the new unified storage systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, Fowler said. These include snapshots/cloning, restores, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS (Common Internet File System), NFS (Network File System), iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning)."
Note that this system includes "RAID".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"All of the new unified storage systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, Fowler said. These include snapshots/cloning, restores, mirroring, RAID-5, RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS (Common Internet File System), NFS (Network File System), iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning)."
Note that this system includes "RAID".
(overheard in the Sun IT break room)
"You know that fucking clueless Marketing guy? Yeah, he asked me to write up something for the new RAID-free array. Heh, I hooked him up."
Sun's storage strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that they've purchased MySQL, StorageTec and Cluster File Systems (of Lustre fame), developed ZFS, implemented CIFS in OpenSolaris from scratch (not Samba based), participated in NFSv4 and constructed the thumper, these machines hardly come as a surprise.
For the last two years, almost all their moves are targeted towards one goal: Enter the storage market from a non-conventional angle. They want to do it unconventionally, because they know that storage more than anything else is becoming The commodity and today's toys won't cut it. Plus, at this point, all the mainstream storage vendors have difficulty tapping the low end. They may be able to sell their expensive products to clients with deep pockets, but for small businesses it's a different story. No to mention that they are unwilling to reinvent themselves. OTOH with all these inventions Sun may be trying to do what it did with workstations when it started in the 80s, start low and increase. Remains to be seen whether they can pull it.
Re:Sun's storage strategy (Score:4, Informative)
Sun CIFS isn't reimplemented from scratch by Sun, it was code they got from their Procom acquisition. It remains to be seen if putting a CIFS server into an otherwise stable kernel is a good idea or not :-).
Jeremy.
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What Everyone is Missing (Score:4, Informative)
This system will intelligently move the data around to put frequently accessed bits on the SSDs. This is a lot more than a 2u server with a few TB drives in a raid 10.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sun rocks.
Real engineering here.
Zettabyte? (Score:3, Informative)
ZFS doesn't stand for zettabyte anything. "The name originally stood for "Zettabyte File System", but is now an orphan acronym." from wikipedia, sourced from http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/you_say_zeta_i_say [sun.com] .
and of course "RAID Array" is lovelily redundant phrasing.
For the love of FSM... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not even apples and oranges, it's more like apples and redwoods.
Last I checked Netapp was still charging $10,000 per TB! [dedupecalc.com] Do you really think there is no reason for this?
Re:For the love of FSM... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to say it, but for the small business market, they should be compared. If you're selling a 2TB redundant storage device to a small business without a huge IT department, then you're competing against what can be built from commodity parts (aka, crap from Newegg + Linux + RAID) because often cost, not performance, is the defining factor.
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RAID-Less how??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The third one I believe--the rest I'm skeptical about...
Re:RAID-Less how??? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe instead of an array of disks it is a hash or maybe even a linked list.
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Re:RAID-Less how??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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oh ok... (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, to those who say small businesses can't afford this, its really an option. Some places like open source hodgepodges of hardware and some do not because their small business generates enough money that investing in enterprise class hardware with gold 4 hour response from a solid company with a history of UNIX experience and integration with Solaris.
Also, said Fortune 500 companies get massive discounts, as what you're seeing is retail price.
this is not competing with the diy market (Score:5, Informative)
The goal of this product is to compete with Netapp. If you've ever experienced Netapp licensing/pricing, this Sun solution is a bargain. People seem to be forgetting that this is a storage appliance.
Re:Looks great.. but (Score:5, Informative)
Will that $600 box be using 14 146 GB 10k RPM SAS disks?
These boxes aren't about providing stupid storage, their about providing massive I/O throughput. The larger boxes scale to 44TB and 576TB respectively. This also automatically moves frequently accessed data to flash drives (and RAM) for even faster I/O.
These are absolutely monstrous compared to anything you could build for $600. There seems to be quite a bit of custom hardware to power this setup.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
Due to deliberate licensing issues we won't have native ZFS in Linux any time soon. However, BtrFS [kernel.org] should be merging into the mainline kernel soon enough (~2.6.29), and it includes most of ZFS's features plus a few of its own: storage pools, checksumming, mutable snapshots, built-in extent-level striping and mirroring, etc. It even supports in-place, reversible conversion from ext3 via a copy-on-write snapshot.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny how this viewpoint is always the one promoted on slashdot. One could argue that the Linux GPL is the problem. FreeBSD and Mac OS X had no problem integrating ZFS into their code precisely because the ZFS license (CDDL) allowed it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes yes yes, you can do that with just $1000 and a afternoon at Fry's or browsing Newegg, right?
Everyone's missing the point here, and a lot of what is being said could be applied (just as wrongly) to NetApp... after all, those are just x86 boxes running a BSD kernel.
The special sauce here is not so much the underlying OpenSolaris OS (which does provid the IO and services such as CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, data replication, and so on) but the Fishworks software put on top of it. Built-in failover clustering, the int
Re:Sun replace RAID with RAID (Score:5, Funny)
"Sun replace RAID with RAID"
No, they replaced it with "RAD"; they took the "I" right out of it.
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Re:Sun replace RAID with RAID (Score:4, Funny)
No, they replaced it with "RAD"; they took the "I" right out of it.
It's all fun and games until someone loses an "I".
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Re:look at Sun x4500 (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:DL180/185 (Score:5, Interesting)
Guh. Sorry. I'm tired, and re-reading my comment the english is well-formed but the concepts are jumbled nonsense. Let me try again, by your leave...
Yes, it's unavoidable to rebuild when you lose a disk, and there will be a performance hit unless you go for full on 100% redundancy, and not many companies can afford to do that with a lot of data.
ZFS offers a number of benefits, though, in the event of drive failure-triggered rebuild, in that it basically knows where the data is and only bothers with that. A hardware controller has no idea what's data and what is blank space and so just redoes everything. In theory, assuming the MB/s of rebuild is the same, a ZFS rebuild of a half-full array should take half the time of a traditional controller.
It is also much more intelligent about *what* it rebuilds, starting at the top and then descending down the FS tree, marking it as known good along the way. This means that if a second drive fails halfway through the resync, instead of a catastrophic failure you still have the data up to the point of failure.
I can't remember where I read that; maybe here: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/smokin_mirrors [sun.com]
But I didn't even want to talk about drive-failure rebuilding, what I actually wanted to say that ZFS is, in theory, less likely to get itself into an inconsistent state in the case of power fluctuations, controller RAM failures, drive failures w/ pending writes, that kind of thing. That's the kind of rebuild I meant - after some kind of catastrophic failure. I should probably have said "integrity checking" though.
By design, ZFS never holds critical data in memory only and so at least in theory should always be consistent on-disk. Basically it shouldn't need to fsck. That is a giant advantage to me, if it turns out to be as good in reality as it sounds on paper. Of course, that also has a lot to do with the capabilities of the FS proper, but removing the evil, evil HW controllers from the picture can only be a plus.
I don't know why, but RAID controllers are the most unreliable pieces of hardware I have ever known, besides the drives themselves (but at least they are consistent and expected to fail). Get a few of them together and something WILL go wrong, more often than not in a horrible and unexpected way. When some RAM goes bad in a HW RAID controller you are in for a whole lot of subtle, silent-error-prone fun. Anything that gets the HW controllers out of the picture is a win for me.
And don't even mention the batteries in HW raid controllers. They are the wrong solution to the power failure problem, especially since it's always after a failure that a disk will decide it's had enough of spinning and would just like to sit still for a while, thank you very much. Drive failure with pending writes! Exactly the words every administrator wants to hear. Almost as good as power failure with pending writes. Combine the two (highly likely!) for maximum LULZ. Ok, this is turning into a rant, I better stop.
Anyway, thanks for the corrections. My original comment (and probably this one) came across as a confused mess upon re-reading .. sorry .. will sleep now : )
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