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Product Idea: "KillerRAID"

356 Views 8 Replies 6 Participants Last post by  Weedvender, 
P
Disclaimer:

Originally, I was going to post this in Hard Drives & Storage, but I don't want to risk this turning into a Linux advocacy thread.

Anyway, as the title says: it popped into my head when I read about the KillerNIC and found out it runs GNU/Linux, so I thought I'd garner opinions for a "KillerRAID" card.

One of the arguments in favour of OS-based RAID is that you don't have to worry about your RAID controller manufacturer going out of business, or discontinuing that product line, if/when your RAID card dies.

The obvious argument in favour of hardware RAID is performance, especially on writes, since the dedicated processor is better at it than a general purpose CPU, and also the CPU would be offloaded anyway.

So, my idea is to combine the two concepts: a hardware RAID card that runs GNU/Linux like the KillerNIC, and lays out data on the drive identically to how Linux RAID does so.

I realise that ZFS and BTRFS change the landscape somewhat, but what do you all think? Is there a market for such a product?
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D
Yeah well that really reduces to being another hardware RAID, but I don't think it can ever perform as good as a real RAID card. It would be alot of fun trying to do what you are saying and you would learn a ton of stuff but I don't think it would be commercially viable.
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DJZeratul
How about a software RAID product that uses CUDA/Stream to do hardware XOR calcs? I dont know why there isnt one yet... That seems like it would be a no brainer... Graphics cards are probably way more efficient than XScale at Hardware XOR because theyre made for that kind of calc (unlike a CPU)
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D
That would be cool but the main thing with RAID has to be reliability. If you depend on a graphics card for RAID you're gonna have a hard time marketing it. A good RAID card itself should be redundant because if it goes you basically lose your whole box. And you don't want to have drive problems because you started playing a GPU intensive game.

Any good RAID solution has to be a dedicated, redundant device or it's not really going to sell much.
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DJZeratul
Well, it would most likely be a bad idea unless you had a dedicated graphics card for it, kinda like people are doing with PhysX. I think the amount of power on say a low level 7xxx 8xxx Geforce or ATI card would be more than enough required to do RAID5 XOR, plus you could use the extra overhead to do some kind of error correction. Plus the SGRAM on the video card could easily be used to do writeback, but you would have to make sure you ran on a UPS so that it would be battery backed. The RAID software could eaily heck your UPS' battery status using the included USB cable that pretty much all UPS systems come with.

It wouldn't be very successful for businesses who have the money to buy a hardware RAID card, but for consumers like us who have limited budgets, have an extra 8400 GS lying around, and an extra PCI-E slot, it may prove to be a popular piece of software
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D
Quote:

Originally Posted by parityboy View Post
Disclaimer:

Originally, I was going to post this in Hard Drives & Storage, but I don't want to risk this turning into a Linux advocacy thread.

Anyway, as the title says: it popped into my head when I read about the KillerNIC and found out it runs GNU/Linux, so I thought I'd garner opinions for a "KillerRAID" card.

One of the arguments in favour of OS-based RAID is that you don't have to worry about your RAID controller manufacturer going out of business, or discontinuing that product line, if/when your RAID card dies.

The obvious argument in favour of hardware RAID is performance, especially on writes, since the dedicated processor is better at it than a general purpose CPU, and also the CPU would be offloaded anyway.

So, my idea is to combine the two concepts: a hardware RAID card that runs GNU/Linux like the KillerNIC, and lays out data on the drive identically to how Linux RAID does so.

I realise that ZFS and BTRFS change the landscape somewhat, but what do you all think? Is there a market for such a product?

There are only a few major RAID manufactors... less than a dozen. They target the server market which means long long lifecycles and continued support.

File systems are OS dependent. Why force a near universal piece of hardware to limit itself to a few file system (which would be supported anyway)?
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DAMN! That's a lot of rep!
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error10
Is XOR even an instruction that a GPU exposes? Edit: OK, yes, it is at least in OpenGL, so that's doable. I don't know how fast or efficient it would be, though, especially when the GPU is busy doing other stuff.
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W
Quote:


Originally Posted by error10
View Post

Is XOR even an instruction that a GPU exposes? Edit: OK, yes, it is at least in OpenGL, so that's doable. I don't know how fast or efficient it would be, though, especially when the GPU is busy doing other stuff.

Another guy with lots of rep!
Err... But if he can pull it off, i'd get it in a heartbeat.
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