Xserve RAID setup for mixed platform office

In our office we have several Macs and Windows machines that regularly read the same files during various tests we run. Unfortunately these files are spread out across various drives on various systems and many of the files are duplicated in many places.
To make us more efficient as well as provide reliable backup for our critical test files I'm considering an Xserve RAID setup.
I understand a computer is needed as a controller and an Xserve is typically used for this. Could a Dual 2GHz G5 serve this purpose? It needs OS X Server installed? Does the G5 get a Fibre Channel card in order to connect to the G5 to the RAID and then the rest of the office can connect to the G5 to access the RAID via GigE.
We are not editing video, I don't see that all the clients need Fibre.
How about Windows clients, are they able to seemlessly access the RAID just like Macs?

> I understand a computer is needed as a controller and an Xserve is typically used for this
Yes, you need a controller, but it doesn't need to be an XServe. Any host will do.
> Could a Dual 2GHz G5 serve this purpose
Yes, quite easily. You just need an appropriate fiber channel card in the host that you're attaching the XServe RAID to.
> It needs OS X Server installed?
No. You don't even need Mac OS X installed - the XServe RAID is platform agnostic and can be used with Windows, Linux, and other Unix systems.
> Does the G5 get a Fibre Channel card in order to connect to the G5 to the RAID and then the rest of the office can connect to the G5 to access the RAID via GigE.
Correct. You'd use some kind of file sharing on the G5 to share the XServe RAID to the network clients. The only caveat is that Mac OS X Client only supports 10 active client connections. If you need more than that you may need Mac OS X Server.
As for the Windows clients, they can access the RAID volume through the G5, too - you'll just need to enable SMB file sharing on the G5.

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Easiest solution for adding Fibre Channel Tape Backup to Xserve RAID setup

I'm interested in getting a Fibre Channel LTO-3 tape library such as the Exabyte 221L for my Xserve RAID/Xserve G5 setup. I realize there are SCSI LTO-3 solutions that are less expensive than FC, but I'd prefer not to have to add a SCSI card to my Xserve, mainly because I'd have to pull the video card and run the server headless (horrors!). However, I understand that I must get a Fibre Channel switch to allow the LTO library, the Xserve, and the Xserve RAID to communicate... you can't just daisy chain FC devices. The least expensive switch I can find is the new QLogtic SANbox 3050 for about $1800. For my situation, in which these will be the only FC devices I'll probably ever use, does this switch sound appropriate? The specs on the switch can be found here: http://www.qlogic.com/products/sanbox/sanbox_3050.asp.
Xserve RAID & Xserve G5 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

For simple environments like yours, it's trivially easy. You must plug everything in, and you're good to go... as simple as a network switch.
Now if you start adding multiple hosts (i.e. plug in a second Xserve or G5), you need to be careful, because in the default configuration everything is "wide open," so every device can see every storage LUN. This would actually be problematic, as systems could (actually, would) corrupt each other's storage. When you get to this point, you'll need to look at either zoning the ports on the switch, or using LUN masking on the Xserve RAID to allocate specific pieces of storage to specific hosts.
But for now, just get the switch, plug everything in, and you're off.
BTW if you mark "answered" for me, versus for the thread overall, it helps me out a bit in this forum ranking system, whatever it is.
Cheers.

Design Suggestion for a new setup for a small office

Hi Guys,
We have a client requirement to setup a small business office to connect to its Head Quaters.
Attached here with the sample High level design.
My Question here is the above mentioned load balancer can used for this setup or not??? It can be connected to once again a router???
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Hey qoool,
You can leave feedback and request features added to the iPhone online here:
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Jason

Creating the best RAID setup for my MacPro using FCP

I have a MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives and I work in FCP 5.1.4 and with my Hardware setup I feel it should be faster and I've been wanting to set up a RAID but not sure how to do it, or the best way way to do it.
Out of the 4 drives I have, Drive one is my main drive (boot drive, apps etc.) Drives (2 & 3) which is a TB combined, I'd like to turn those into a RAID) to speed up rendering, editing etc. In FCP and Motion. Drive 4 is where I keep all my working files.
My files are backed up regularly onto external harddrives and kept offsite.
Can I leave everything I have on my entire system the way it is and just turn Drives 2 & 3 into a RAID that's best for this application? People who work in VIDEO I know do this all the time to speed things up but I can't find the steps for the best way to do this. Bits and pieces all over the place but I can't put this puzzle together.
Can you point me in the direction in how to do this?
As I'm doing this is there anything I should be careful about?
Please help me understand this process.
Just in case you need to know what kind of drives I have here's the info:
Capacity: 465.76 GB
Model: ST3500641AS P
Revision: 3.BTA
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Bay Name: "Bay 1"
OS9 Drivers: No
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Startup Drive:
Capacity: 465.44 GB
Available: 367.86 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
Mount Point: /

My advice would be 'yes' to what you are saying... with the exception of the Softraid stuff - not that I think its wrong, but I've never used it, so I can't comment if you need it or whether the Mac OSX raid is sufficient - but others here say they prefer it so fair enough. You can see some comparisons here http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/softraid/351/
amug always have indepth benchmarks of stuff.
I wouldnt call myself an FCP guru, but I think that your suggestion of putting the FCP scratch disk and client, video files on the raid are the best idea. The scratch folder is essentially where the temp-rendered clips go, so its audio and video - you want that folder to be on a really fast volume. You also want your source video files to be on a really fast volume, so they can be streamed fast enough to play in realtime too when playing unrendered areas, or building a preview.
Some might say in FCP you get bast performance when your scratch disks and video files are on seperate disks. Thats totally true, so it can read from one disk and write to the other at the same time. But in your case you have a 3disk stripe, which is roughly 3x faster than either of your disks! So it would still be faster to have them all on the same stripe.
You can leave your FCP app on the sys drive, keeps things cleaner (drive1 for sys and appsm raid for data). You can keep your project files where ever you want, they're not very big and are kept in memory so dont affect performance at all. Though to stay clean I would keep it on the raid, so again the raid is for data, and you can back it up accordingly. The system drive is only for apps and system so you can back that up accordingly too (less frequently probably).
P.S. Technically your 'point 8' is inaccurate. After creating the raid you will not see drives 2,3 or 4. You will see only one 'volume' for all 3 drives. Overall your mac will have 2 'volumes': the system drive, and the stripe of 2,3,4. Physical drives and 'volumes' that mount in your OS are completely seperate. You can create multiple partitions in a single drive, or you can combine multiple drives into a single volume (e.g. using raid). But basically yes, you copy your client files back to the raid.
And remember, if any ONE of the disks in the stripe dies, you lose ALL of the data on the entire 1.5TB volume. So it is pretty important to backup regularly!!!!
(I dont wanna confuse you any more, but raid5 is a good option if you want more security and don't mind paying extra :P, you'll need more hardware for that, and more drives to make it worthwhile - but I would say skip that for now, as you can build your raid0 for free or almost free and use that until you think you need more)

Xserve raid right for me?

Hey all, I do video editing at ble Ray quality (Which is very high in size) and was wondering what raid is good for me. I took a look at a couple of them but the Xserve raid looks so nice and powerful with data transfer. The only prob is that the xserve raid is costly and is running older drives and everything. My question is- should I go with the xserve raid which is running older drives and has not been selling for the past two years, or should i just find some other raid to go with?

Hello,
The Xserve RAID was nice for its time, but I would suggest considering the Promise:
http://www.apple.com/server/storage/
This is Apple's preferred storage, and is much faster and more resilient than the Xserve RAID. You could optionally start out with eight drives and expand to the full sixteen when needed. The hardware is solid, and easy to configure as well.

Best RAID setup for Home Directories

Hi there,
I'm looking to upgrade our existing infrastructure which is 5 or 6 years old. We have an old Xserve RAID which has 4x 250Gb disks in a RAID 5 configuration which gives about 640Gb of storage for home directories. However the peak number of users has shot up to something like 85.
I want to be able to increase the storage space for home users but also to provide a RAID storage solution that has optimised performance for the number of users we now have.
Is there any kind of ratio or guideline to the kind of configuration/system I should be looking at? Can anyone offer any advice?
It's a gigabit ethernet network, so obviously I realise that performance is limited by that also.
Any help much appreciated.

OK, that helps a lot.
The CPU load on the server seems a little higher than I'd expect. What's the activity level of the RAID? Are the disks continually active? Are the fiber channel activity lights (the vertical columns of LEDs in the middle) all active?
That will help track the issue to the host system or the RAID.
If the disk activity lights are always busy then it may be an issue with the number of drives for the number of users, and more physical drives would help.
This could also be indicative of a too-full volume (RAID 5 volumes will degrade in performance over about 85% full. At 95% full performance may be excruciatingly slow).
If the fiber channel activity levels are high then the problem is the amount of disk access and your best bet would be to expand to the other half of the array (this will double the available fiber channel bandwidth between the host and the RAID).
If the RAID activity levels aren't high then it could be a network bottleneck on the server, in which case link aggregation could help - it isn't just for redundancy, it will load balance client traffic over the links, effectively increasing performance for clients.
You are right that if you try to expand the current volume with drives, the drives will be sized to 250GB, regardless of their physical capacity. For this reason you would need to build a new array on the other side of the RAID and copy the data over.
The ideal situation would be 14 new drives which you could build into two 7-disk arrays which are then striped on the host system.

4 xserves + xserve raid setup?

Hello,
I have ben using xserves independently (no raid storage) for many years now.
Now, I would like to hook all my xserves (G4, G5, intel) to a xserve RAID and have the xserves all share the storage on the raid.
I know this is a broad question, but what do I need to set this up?
These servers are primarily web servers, so no user files are involved.
TIA for any tips/pointers given
P.S. Should I wait on the new RAID (rumored to have switch and sata drives)?
MaBook Pro 2.4 GHZ | 4GB RAM, 7200 HD Mac OS X (10.4.10)

First you have to look at the volumes. Are you planning/hoping to have all servers directly access the same files? If that's the case you're going to need some kind of SAN solution such as Apple's XSAN ($1000 per node, plus a dedicated controller server)
Then, in order to physically connect multiple servers to a RAID you will need a fiber channel switch. This will let the four servers connect to the two ports on the RAID.
All in all, you're probably looking at a $10K solution.
The alternatives are to:
a) divide the RAID into four separate slices and give each node its own slice of the array. This still requires a fiber channel switch, but doesn't need XSAN (you then have to work out synchronization between the different servers), or
b) Turn one of the servers into a NAS server (using either AFP or NFS) and have the other servers mount the XServe RAID over the network.
This solves the synchronization issue (there's one copy of the data that everyone sees), but isn't as fast as a fiber channel-based solution (everything has to go through that one server). It is, however, free.

Xserve Raid Setup Help

I need some help with a MAC Pro with Xserve that I am trying to help setup. My company is replacing a very old server. They just purchase a MAC Pro with Xserve with a Mac Raid card and 4 x 1TB drives. The server is just going to be for data storage. What is the best way to setup the RAID. Ideally I would like to have the operating system on a different partition with a RAID and the data on different partitions but I do not want a 1TB partition for just the operating system. What is going to be the best way to partition and RAID these drives. Also buy anything additional is not really an option.

It's not entirely clear to me what you have here.
You mention:
MacPro
XServe
which are two distinctly different systems. Do you have one physical machine or two?
I'm guessing you mean you have a Mac Pro with Mac OS X Server and that the MacPro has 4 x 1TB drives attached to the RAID card. That's partly based on the fact that the XServe can only handle 3 internal drives, not 4.
If that's the case then the best way to setup the drives depends largely on your preferences. Personally I'd look at something like a hardware RAID 5 of all the drives (results in a ≈3TB volume) which you can then partition into two parts (one of a few hundred GB for the OS and the rest for the data), but there are many other configurations that would be just as valid.

Account-Setup for mixed network

Happy New Year to everybody!
Here's my problem: We have a mixed environment with lots of Wiindows and some Macs (ca. 30). We run a OS X server 10.3.9. All windows-machine got their login on the server but store the data locally.
For the macs we haven't found a way of making them login to the network everytime they log in locally and still have them keep their data locally.
We figured out it might be best to setup mobile accounts, but it seems as if we're too stupid to do so...
We followed step-by-step the setup proposed in the Mac OS X Server-Handbook, but apparently we're missing a point there.
When I log in a supposedly mobile account on a local machine it should create a new mobile account. But it doesn't. It just doesn't recognize the username and shakes desperately...
What must we change in order to make the local machine check on the server, whether this user is a mobile account or not?
Or does anyone have a better solution to solve this problem?
All suggestions are gladly welcome!!!
Thank you in advance
senex

http://www.amazon.de/Server-Tiger-Visual-QuickPro-Guides/dp/0321362446/sr=8-6/qi d=1167814722/ref=sr16/302-9265250-9674445?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de
http://www.amazon.de/MAC-Server-Essentials-Apple-Training/dp/0321357582/ref=pdbxgy__imgb/302-9265250-9674445
The first being gui centric the latter being full of technical details.
For to configure clients to query the server use DirectoryService.app -> LDAPv3.
Use dscl to check if your client can succesfully query LDAP. See man dscl.
HTH
-Ralph
Other OS

RAID setup for a Mac Pro

I'm trying to figure out what would be the best configuration for my Mac Pro tower as far as storage and backup is concerned. I want a RAID drive with hot swappable slots but I'm not sure what the best solution is. Apple's SAN and xServe seem far too sophisticated for my needs (not to mention pricey). I bought a Norco DS-500B eSATA RAID storage array but the RAID controller card is a PCI-X and incompatible with my machine (although the documentation says it's totally compatible...weird). And so in my investigation as to what card to get to replace the one provided, I couldn't find any reviews on this product, save one which said that the array is very bad and will destroy all your hard drives. Sooo...I'm returning the array in search of a new one, but again my investigation has turned up very little. Am I the only one? Or am I out of touch with the real solution?

What's missing in your post is two of the most important elements.
How much storage do you need?
There is a myriad of options if you want 2-5TB of space. Not so many if you want 2-5 petabytes of space
How much are you prepared to spend?
You have many, many options at $100,000, but no so many at $100
The other thing to consider is that by and large, price reflects quality - either in reliability or performance (or both).
If your budget is, say, $2000 you have to decide whether you're better off buying a budget 5TB system or a pro 2TB system - the latter system clearly has less capacity but may offer higher performance and/or reliability. Any RAID system is only as good as all the parts, and the physical drives are only a small element there. The controller, internal electronics, cabling and even interface can have just as much impact on a reliable RAID system (almost any RAID system can recover from a failed disk, but a burned-out controller is harder to recover from).

Questions on Marvell vs. intel Raid setup for new build

I’m getting ready to do my first build this weekend, and had some questions on the Asus p9x79pro motherboard’s raid controllers. They are:
What is the difference between the Marvell controller and the intel software controller?
Why would I use one over the other?
Do the Marvell raid controllers need to be pre-installed using the F6 method, same as the intel raid controllers?
Here is my planned drive arrangement, feedback appreciated.
(1) Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - OS (win7 64 bit), pagefile, & programs, 6gb sata on SSD caching port
(2) Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive - RAID 0 Media and projects, 6b sata port
(1) Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive - media cache & renders
(1) WB Black 32mb cache 3.0 Sata - Exports and non video file storage
Asus BD burner on 3gb port
Thanks

What is the difference between the Marvell controller and the intel software controller?
I haven't tested it, but rumors are that Intel is marginally faster than Marvell.
Why would I use one over the other?
It depends on the number of ports in your system. That can be motherboard dependent.
Do the Marvell raid controllers need to be pre-installed using the F6 method, same as the intel raid controllers?
No. You can define a raid after you installed your OS by simply going into the BIOS.
On my motherboard, I have 2 Intel SATA 6 G ports and 2 Marvell SATA 6 G ports. The rest are SATA 3 G.
If that is the same in your case, I would do the following:
Crucial M4 on Intel SATA 6G
WD Black on Intel SATA 6G
2 x WD Black/64 on Marvell SATA 6G in raid0
WD Black/32 on Intel SATA 3G
DVD/BDR on Intel SATA 3G
one SATA 3G for eSATA connection.

Best RAID setup for me?

Hi
Harm has advised me - and everybody else - to go RAID! So I am about to investigate a bit before I take the big step...
My MOBI supports (according to website) RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. I think - after reading a lot about it - that I could be tempted to chioose RAID 10 - I have 2 1,5 TB disks allready - so I thought about buying another two with same size and set it up as RAID 10 - because as Wikipedia says:
RAID 10
RAID 1+0 (or 10) is a mirrored data set (RAID 1) which is then striped (RAID 0), hence the "1+0" name. A RAID 1+0 array requires a minimum of four drives – two mirrored drives to hold half of the striped data, plus another two mirrored for the other half of the data. In Linux, MD RAID 10 is a non-nested RAID type like RAID 1 that only requires a minimum of two drives and may give read performance on the level of RAID 0.
What about that? Good or bad? I don´t know if my MOBO supports 1+0 or is 1+0 and 10 the same thing?
This is my MOBO: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard& ProductID=2988&ProductName=GA-EX58-UD4
Morten

Bryan and Morten,
Can you please provide me with a link how to do the softmod on GTS250? I'm not into posiiton to purchase GTX285 at the moment so, I'll give the 'soft mod' option a shot before I decide which to upgrade first - the GPU or the 6 gigs of RAM i have in my system.
My misfortunes with Adobe/AVCHD are the exact same ones experienced by Morten - even a sinle layer of avchd content in the timeline stutters in both the source monitor and the outcome monito in CS4 and is pain to edit for that reason. Try to add a single video effect (like colour correction) or even a signle transition and ... oh, boy! the editing becomes hell and I start feeling sorry that I did not go for Canon HV40 camcroder that shoots HDV on those good old casettes.
Back to your question Bryan regarding the allocation of hdd - this is the advice I got from Harm on the topic. Also included here is advice on which drives to set in Raid 0 in priority order. Hope this helps:
System with 3HDD
C: OS & programs
D: page file, media cache and renders/previews plus miscellaneous
E: media and exports
System with 4HDD
C: OS & programs
D: Windows page file and renders/previews plus miscellaneous
E: original media
F: media cache and exports
Alternative suggestion:
C: OS & Apps
D: pagefile, temp files (Windows), miscellaneous and exports.
E: media
F: projects and rendered/scratch files
Which to put first on Raid 0?
1. Media cache and renders/previews is useful to put first if you do a lot of scrubbing and previewing.
2. That leaves media in the middle.
3. Exports would be last on my list to put on the raid. Export is a one-way street and time is not really critical.

XServe RAID setup: best setup to to create a single volume

Hello,
I am setting up a 14-disk xRaid but I could not fin an option to "join" the 14 drives to create a single RAID 5 volume from Raid Admin app.
I could only create 2 Raid 5 volumes, one for each group of 7 disks (6 data + spare).
The manual says I have to use Disk Utility to join the two volumes into a single one to reach the maximun capacity on a single volume.
The spare drives should take care of their own RAID 5 (group of 7 disks each), if I am not mistaken.
Should I use "striped" or "concatenated" raid set in Disk Utility?
Many thanks for your help!
Ciao
Carlo

Hi
http://manuals.info.apple.com/enUS/RAIDAdmin1.2121406.pdf
page 22. If you've not already done so you may also want to look here:
http://www.apple.com/support/xserveraid/
More information on RAID Levels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NestedRAIDlevels
Tony

Monitor Setup for Intel Platform

I have installed Solaris 8 on Intel Platform. But I am unable to set the Color resolution of my Monitor and it is working in Monochrome mode. How do I set the Monitor back to color ?

Output 1-2 are connected to the "main-outputs" on the 003 which are thus controlled by the volume knob. The center monitor on output 8 isn't. This is where i was getting the volume difference. I'm presuming they should be the same volume.

Best RAID setup for MSI Z77A-G43

I currently have my desktop set up with an SSD as C: and 2 x 1TB HDD as D: in a RAID 1 configuration.
I'd like to add a second SSD to increase capacity of my C: drive. Ideally I'd like to set both SSDs at RAID 0. Would this be possible without having to rebuild the OS? Alternatively, could I configure them as JBOD without affecting the current installation?
Any help would be appreciated.
David.

Quote
I'd like to add a second SSD to increase capacity of my C: drive. Ideally I'd like to set both SSDs at RAID 0. Would this be possible without having to rebuild the OS?
don't think so, you have to combine them both and format after that before use it

Xserve RAID setup for mixed platform office

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