Just wanted to say thanks for a great product.

[travis]

That works even better than what I thought. We recently migrated our servers to a single box running virtualbox to provide the few network services we need to provide for our small office (they had been running on old slow desktop boxes.)

According to the documentation I was expecting a slowdown once we started running on the virtual machine. I was happily surprised to find that performance has not been effected at all, and if anything is better than it was. Of course the hardware it's running on now probably helps.

Anyway, the machine specs if anyone is interested.
MB: ASUS KCMA-D8
CPU: 2x Opteron 4170HE @ 2.1GHz
MEM: 8x Kingston Value Ram 2GB
PSU: ZALMAN 750W
HD: 4x 1TB WD Green (Linux software raid 5)
HD: 640GB WD Blue Edition System Drive

Tha base OS is Fedora14. The zmanda server is running on Fedora12 with a 500GB Virtualbox drive that exists on the software raid.

The only bad thing is that the motherboard is so new that they don't have all the bugs worked out, which prevented us from using the built-in raid controller to do a hardware raid5. Mixed blessing I guess as we can now put the 4 raided disks in another system, remount them and be running agen.

We're seeing a max of around 150GB per night across our network so it's not huge yet (give it a year or two at most I think.)

Thanks!
Travis Hershberger
Precision Herbs PHMA

[mb_zmanda]

We are of course pleased to always hear nice feedback about our products. Great that it works so well for you!

A side note:

The RAID controller that you refer to on the motherboard is software based, you can see it here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131670

these are the product specs.
I have so far not seen one motherboard that provides hardware raid. All they do is offer software raid that is on a chip. This offers no speed advantages (since the CPU still has to crunch all the data, the same as in Linux Software raid) and locks you into a proprietary format: if you were to move your harddisk to another motherboard, you are out of luck, since that board will not be able to read the raid format.

You also need drivers for Linux or Windows to support these raid on chip systems. A true hardware raid abstracts the raid in such a way that it appears as a single disk, without drivers.

I personally have made very good experiences with Linux Software raid (about 6+ years on several systems). It is not that trivial to configure, but once it is running, it is very stable. It is important though to use a stable Linux platform for it, not a cutting edge brand new one, as they tend to have more bugs (which might also affect the raid stability). Ever since the bottle neck of the PCI bus has been removed, software raid has become a true alternative in raid for low end plattforms. And Linux Software raid is also platform independent, you can more the disks to any other motherboard that the kernel will support and it will run. And of course the data format of the raid data is not proprietary.

This from my own experiences, your mileage might vary.

Markus