The Software RAID Inflection Point
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@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
You don't think that XenServer could get more customers by having this included? The customer wouldn't need a 1000$ hardware RAID card anymore.
XenServer doesn't even care to officially support MD RAID the normal way which is already there and works great. No, I don't think there is any way for XenServer, RHEL, ESXi or anyone else to make this make any financial sense whatsoever.
Then why not abandon it completely?
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Here is the thing, I think you are scratching an itch that just isn't there. Who actually needs this functionality? Who is the real world use case where this script would change buying decisions? And how do those changed buying decisions turn into direct financial benefit for the company that makes and supports the new software?
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
Why would someone be willing to pay for XS support, but not support of MD in XS?
Why do people pay for VMware with the same limitations (actually with fewer limitations?) Because you are picking something no one cares about and wondering why it doesn't drive decisions. It doesn't because no one cares.
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
You don't think that XenServer could get more customers by having this included? The customer wouldn't need a 1000$ hardware RAID card anymore.
XenServer doesn't even care to officially support MD RAID the normal way which is already there and works great. No, I don't think there is any way for XenServer, RHEL, ESXi or anyone else to make this make any financial sense whatsoever.
Then why not abandon it completely?
Because there is no reason to spend money to abandon something that some people use and taking it out would make it super duper easy for someone to repackage XenServer with it and cut the XS team out of the equation.
Reverse the question, why WOULD they take it out?
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
Try making the business case for it. State where the investment money would come from, how you will continue to pay for supporting it and how you will recoup the money.
Why would a company be willing to pay for support of RHEL, but not this?
Because one is important and the other doesn't matter. How much money are you willing to spend to get support for the sole purpose of avoiding buying a $700 hardware card that comes bundled with the server and is fully supported by the hardware vendor? In real dollars, how much will you convince your company to invest in software support for RAID to replace their current hardware spending on the same functionality?
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aww, so that it. The price of a RAID controller is so low that getting a software solution isn't worth the effort. OK I think I'm on the same page now.
They can't do it cheaper, and still make money.. so why bother doing it at all. That makes sense.
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
aww, so that it. The price of a RAID controller is so low that getting a software solution isn't worth the effort. OK I think I'm on the same page now.
They can't do it cheaper, and still make money.. so why bother doing it at all. That makes sense.
Right, they don't care because it isn't much money and hardware RAID is universal (doesn't care which OS or hypervisor is used on top). If they need to pay extra for software RAID, the benefits diminish. And if you really need to save money, you can use MD RAID already today. Or you can get hardware RAID refurbished and it is not all that much, maybe $400. So the total amount of savings for customers is tiny, the effort is bigger, there is more risk and the potential profits to a vendor are super tiny, especially as RAID is basically dead already, and no direct way for any vendor to capitalize on it.
So no one is looking to pay for this solution, and no one is looking to make money by creating it. There is neither an itch to be scratched nor a scratch looking for an itch.
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What does @scale use? RAIN?
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
What does @scale use? RAIN?
Yes. Must like I describe with an additional layer that understands the drive speeds (like SSD, 10K and 7.2K.) So it does the things I mention plus it knows which bits go onto which type of storage.
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You can't have any kind of effective hyperconvergence without RAIN. RAID doesn't scale out well at all. You can use RAID under RAIN, but that is pretty limiting.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
Here is the thing, I think you are scratching an itch that just isn't there. Who actually needs this functionality? Who is the real world use case where this script would change buying decisions? And how do those changed buying decisions turn into direct financial benefit for the company that makes and supports the new software?
I'll just throw a quick thank you to @Dashrender, as almost everyone in IT seems to go through this same thought process at some point. Now we have a reference page
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
The hardware RAID is already taking away the work from MSPs / ITSPs, so what's the difference there?
It doesn't work that way. It takes no time to set up either. MD RAID is already a "zero effort" set up process. But there is pay for supporting it. It's not that this would really hurt an MSP, but it would cost a fortune to make it and support the code, money that could never be recouped, not even with tens of thousands of customers all using it.
So each Linux distro has it's own version of MD? it's not universal like so many other components?
How did you get from somewhere to this?
From here.
@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
Who pays for MD development now?
The OS vendors, of course. It's part of the OS.
It's actually part of the Linux Kernel now. So maintained under that for all Linux distributions.
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@travisdh1 said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
It's actually part of the Linux Kernel now. So maintained under that for all Linux distributions.
Has been for a long time. But the majority of the Linux kernel is maintained by Red Hat, IBM, Suse and Canonical.
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So it's not maintained by the OS vendors - it's maintained by the kernel support team?
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@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
So it's not maintained by the OS vendors - it's maintained by the kernel support team?
Which is mostly from the OS vendors. Who do you think makes the kernel?
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@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
So it's not maintained by the OS vendors - it's maintained by the kernel support team?
Which is mostly from the OS vendors. Who do you think makes the kernel?
Whoever Linus Torvalds thinks submits a good kernel patch. Which today is mostly the OS vendors.
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@travisdh1 said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@scottalanmiller said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
@Dashrender said in The Software RAID Inflection Point:
So it's not maintained by the OS vendors - it's maintained by the kernel support team?
Which is mostly from the OS vendors. Who do you think makes the kernel?
Whoever Linus Torvalds thinks submits a good kernel patch. Which today is mostly the OS vendors.
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/red-hat-leads-open-source-contributions-to-kernel
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Red Hat, Suse and IBM do the majority of the work with Intel as an "also mentioned."
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By 2011 this had changed some, Novell/Suse had fallen to fourth and Intel picked up the pace. Microsoft was at 17th at that point.
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Canonical is probably somewhere up there in the top ten. But over time it remains that Red Hat, Suse, IBM and Intel are the big four that make Linux happen. And overall corporate is 75% of the kernel while volunteer is 25%.
Big banks, governments and military are all big contributors as well.
