[Info-vax] Volume shadowing and current SCSI standards ?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-04-29 22:11:24 +0000, chris said:

> On 04/29/22 17:04, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> 
>> ...Controller-based (whether in-board and out-board) RAID support...
> 
> May be irrelevant, but HP Smartarray controllers, have built in 
> firmware to define various raid levels and are trivial to setup from 
> bios. Not only that, but a failed raid member can typically be 
> physically replaced with no host intervention at all. The Smartarray
> firmware just rebuilds the set in background. Not all allow transparent 
> access to individual drives, but must be part of a set, even a single 
> drive, to be seen by the host.
> 
> Have use those controllers for years and they are pretty bulletproof, 
> but not sure how they would work with vms...

Various Compaq, HP, and HPE Smart Array controllers are supported on 
OpenVMS, and have some nice features. Some is commonly used as core I/O 
on some of the Integrity Itanium servers.

The Smart Array x86-64 BIOS configuration stuff is occasionally 
problematic with OpenVMS on Alpha or Itanium, but it does work.

One of the more quietly useful features of the Smart Array is the 
ability to migrate the storage to a different Smart Array controller by 
swapping (just) the HDDs, or swapping the cables around. That's been 
handy.

For controllers lacking UEFI support or HTTPS support or ilk, VSI will 
either need to work with the controller vendors to create configuration 
tools for OpenVMS x86-64, or boot a vendor-supported platform to 
reconfigure the controller.

I'm mostly using Promise Pegasus and Synology storage in the low-end 
DAS/NAS positioning else-platform, but the Smart Array gear does work 
well for low-end DAS RAID storage.


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