MegaRAID Storage Manager

The MegaRAID Storage Manager is a much more evolved and mature management interface than the WebBIOS CU is. Its been added to and refined over time into an extremely easy to use toolkit. It doesn’t just allow for local administration of the card. It also allows you to manage other servers and machines on your network with LSI storage adapters in them.

This is generally a much more forgiving interface to work in. When it comes to card setup and configuration and reconfiguration. A large assortment of options exist. With well a display of just about every little piece of information you would like to know. Management of alarms and virtual drives, and individual disks within an array are all accessible from here.

Reconfiguration and retasking of storage is also possible to a greater degree than within the WebBIOS CU. Array conversion, and reassignment of pooled storage options also exist.

The very bottom of the software shows a log from the card itself. Everything in the self contained logfile is displayed here at the bottom of the screen. Alarms, scheduled events running and finishing  bbu testing all make frequent appearances in this area.

I generally found pretty much everything self explanatory in this tool. In the few situations I was questioning what something was the information needed was either context sensitive help, or listed within that section of the tool. Really just about any admin can grab this tool first time through and be able to make it through configuration quickly and correctly.

CacheCade

The CacheCade option that is added onto this card is an interesting adaptation of tiered storage in a single package. Primarily tiered storage is used in large storage appliances and SAN(Storage Area Network) installations. Teired storage generally allows you to take advantage of different types of storage as a whole. A combination of price and performance comes into play.

You generally have a mix of SSD’s, high rpm low seek time hard drives, and large commodity hard drives. High performance enterprise SSD’s generally make up your first tier of storage, or as a write and read cache in some setups. In some situations large amounts of physical memory come into play as part of the read and write cache as well  Data is often evaluated from there, depending on the setup. Then usually makes its way to spindled disks for storage. We’re not gonna go into deduplication or automatic archiving in this since these are not tasks that CacheVault is currently capable of tackling (it really has no need to based on the supported amount of storage).

CacheCade allows you to setup a small implementation of tiered storage. In You can do this easily at creation of a hard disk array, or at a later date in the controller management software. You can do the same for adding a pool of SSD’s to be used as cache for the controller.

CacheCade Pro allows additional options to be enabled when using SSD caching. Instead of being limited to purely increasing read performance, which is what the baseline version of CacheCade allows. CacheCade Pro allows read and write, and what they call Write back(which is both read and write allowed).

*some screenshots taken from LSI’s CacheCade Documentation, more information and the source of these images can be had here from LSI’s website.