iSCSI 3ware raid option HW & SW

Hi,

A company setup a new iSCSI using open-e for me. I see they are using hardware raid (3ware Inc 9650SE SATA-II RAID PCIe) and if I go into open-e S/W Raid I see they have setup software raid too. What I'd like to know is if this is standard practice when setting up open-e?

I would have personally just setup H/W raid using the card's RAID6 like they have done, but what Icant understand is why there is something under S/W Raid, is this maybe slowing down my array if they have done it this way?

thanks
Barry

What I can say is that we was using software raid 5 in the past and the the performance was verly slow. We are using Open-E as a storage for virtual machines. We changed to hardware raid 10 with a 3ware 9650 controller. Then the performance was much better.

I don't know what they configured for you. But for me it makes no sense and I would delete the software raid.

So you do hardware raid 10 on the 3ware consolfe, and then within DSSv6 you have no software raid?

Just trying to work out if I have 2 levels of raid in this case and whether this could be slowing me down as I have hardware raid 6 within my 3ware console, but if i click S/W Raid in DSSv6 it also shows a raid array.

I'm getting useless speeds of 200mbits (not bytes so +-20% of 1Gb link) write and 600mbits (60& of 1Gb link) reads.

Open-E support seems very slow perhaps because of my timezone difference plus this support forum is not very busy with their replys or comments and the community seems very small, I'm wondering if I have made a very bad decision going with open-e.

barry