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LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 82o8ELPFrom STORAGE Magazine
Vol 7, Issue 6 - September 2007 A key feature of this latest controller is that it employs LSI's new SAS IC (integrated circuit) technology. Older LSI controllers use Intel IOP processors and separate embedded cache memory - but the onboard LSISAS1068E integrates everything neatly together into a single chip solution which includes a dedicated 255MHz ARM966 processor. As you can see from the low price this unique approach offers significant cost benefits as it reduces the complexity of the board design and manufacturing overheads. The controller is a PCI-e 4X card but LSI also offers the SAS 8208XLP which is a 133MHz PCI-X version. The card is up to the usual high standards of build quality we've come to expect from LSI and its half-length, half-height format allows it to easily slot into slim-line 1U rack servers. LSI is also aiming this card at high performance workstation applications and the kit includes full and low-profile mounting brackets. It comes equipped with two internal 4-port SFF 8087 ports mounted at the rear and the kit includes a pair of one metre four-port break-out cables complete with power connectors. The controller offers a tasty menu of array options as you can choose from RAID-0, -1, -10 and -5 and it can handle logical drives larger than 2TB. We installed the card in a Supermicro 3GHz dual Xeon 5160 rack server equipped with 4GB of fully buffered memory and running Windows Server 2003 R2. For performance testing we connected a quartet of high performance 33GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 SAS hard disks. Array configuration is a breeze as during boot up you can use the card's WebBIOS utility. This provides a smart graphical interface from where you can select an adapter and view its properties along with those of attached drives. Wizards are provided for quick RAID array creation or you can take manual control and create custom arrays yourself. LSI's MegaRAID Storage Manager (MSM) utility is provided for Windows and Linux systems and takes RAID management a step further. It provides equally good management access as WebBIOS but presents a tidy interface offering plenty of assistance and easy access to the various features. It also offers wizards for a simple three-step array creation process where you select the drives to be included, choose an array type, modify its parameters if required and leave the card to get on with building it. Monitoring tools are plentiful allowing you to keep a close eye on the controller along with physical and virtual drives. An event log panel below provides an at-a-glance view of activity and errors and icons next to each array entity will reveal any problems. To test performance we used the open-source Iometer utility and began with it configured with one disk worker, 64KB transfer requests and 100 per cent sequential reads. We started with a single drive and then added a second, third and fourth drive each time assigning a new worker to each drive. The four tests returned impressive raw read rates of 75MB/sec, 172MB/sec, 260MB/sec and 348MB/sec respectively. The MegaRAID SAS 8208ELP is an ideal choice for a range of server and
high-end workstation applications and will appeal particularly to cost-conscious
system integrators. It delivers excellent performance, is particularly easy to
configure and manage and the kit includes everything you're likely to need
making it look even better value. ST |
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