Once we proved we could do in-band and out-band management on the array controllers, we turned back to installing Linux (20 minutes!) and I went browsing the net. While the IBM install docs are good, they don’t hold a candle on the RedBooks some days. RedBooks are written by people who have used the kit, and are trying to do things with it, and have already hit the same stumbling blocks. Lo and behold, paraphrased ‘Linux does not support RDAC or the SM agent for in-band management.’ What? Why the hell does the documentation for installing it tell me to install them then!?

Out-band management, here we come. Everything works. Even got the firmware updated so that the storage manager on the unit was the same level as the manager on our management stations – which enabled the storage partitions licence (or ability to add the licence), tidied up the interface and hid a few things.

I went home somewhere around 7 P.M. on Sunday. I was back at work by 7:30 A.M. on Monday, doing final array tests, speed tests, hot-spare tests, ‘oops, a controller just failed’ tests and more. It all worked. Planned for installation that evening – can’t take long, there’s only 70 gig of SQL tables to be copied, and drivers to be installed on 2 servers. Shouldn’t have said that really, we didn’t leave Manchester until 2 A.M., and we started on time! In the end, the real-world performance numbers weren’t as good as my tests. I think the aacraid driver under the 2.4 series kernels is a bit slow, because that’s the only real reason I have for a pair of mirrored SCSI 10K RPM disks offloading data at 5 MB/s – my tests indicated that the physical drives could push 30+ MB/s. So a ~1 hour data copy took almost 3 hours.