UCS C200 RAID solution

[vytas-kim]

Hello,

I'm hoping for your help regarding technical question about RAID.

We have  purchased a Cisco rackmount server UCS C200. Now I'm searching for information about the best RAID solution in our  case.

The question:

As I understand, there is a built-in RAID solution: Intel ICH10R in UCS  C200 server. We are using this RAID configuration right now and it works  OK. However we wonder if it is worth to install PCIe Controller (we have  HP Smart Array P410 (ATA/SAS2) card). We currently use 4 SATA hard  drives and RAID works as expected but we are interested if there are any  advantages of separate RAID controller card. Especially we are  interested in performance benefits since we are planning to have quite a  lot of disk writes (call records - approximately 10-20 calls per hour  lasting 2 minutes in average). We would be happy to stay with built-in  RAID if it works stable. On the other hand we will install the above  mentioned Intel RAID card if You say that it would be better solution  regarding reliability and disk wear.

I would be thankful for any comments.

Regards,

Vytas

[Robert Burns · Accepted solution]

Vytas,

Your question will likely come down to supported RAID levels of each card.  The performance of each should be relavitley the same, so I wouldn't focus on that.

The only supported RAID controllers are listed here, and must be purchased from Cisco:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C200M1/install/RAID.html#wp1015625

Others "may" function, but you would be on your own if you ran into any issues with TAC.

The onboard Intel ICH10R card supports up to four SATA drives using RAID0 (striped) or RAID1 (mirrored).

If you require a RAID5, 10 or other, then you'd need a MegaRAID controller to do so.

All RAID controllers supplied by Cisco are heavily tested and would be your best option for both reliability and performance.

Regards,

Robert

[vytas-kim]

Thank You for the answer.

Vytas