A Raid card is essential to just about every enterprise server there is. On top of increasing performance, they also introduce fault tolerance. Finding the right card is important as this could mean the difference between happy and frustrated users, as well as contented network managers.

AMI's MegaRaid Enterprise 1600 Controller card comes in two flavours, with or without an optional transportable memory module. This module helps transfer cached memory between different controllers.

The card itself is a full-length 64bit PCI card running at 66Mhz. It has an Intel i960 chipset and is PCI 2.2-compliant. The card was reasonably easy to install in our test machine, running on an Intel Pentium III 533Mhz processor and Windows 2000.

The card has dual Ultra-160 SCSI channels onboard. Each channel supports up to 15 devices and a total of six non-disc drives per controller. Connection to physical devices is made through the two external P68 connectors and two internal (UHD) connectors.

On the level
The card supports the usual suspects of Raid levels - 0, 1, 3 and 5 - and some additional modes such as Raid 50. This mode allows Raid 5 partitions to perform striping between themselves. This, of course, would take a lot of drives, which is why this card supports up to 40 logical and 32 physical drives.

When we booted up the machine after logging in, the hardware was located easily and the drivers provided on the disc didn't seem to cause any trouble at all.

Included in the package are drivers for a wide range of different operating systems, including Windows NT4/2000, Netware 4.2/5.x, and Dos 6.xx, in addition to the various flavours of Unix such as SCO UnixWare, BSDI, FreeBSD and RedHat Linux.

On the manufacturer's website it claims that there will be drivers available for Itanium-based operating systems when they finally make an appearance. The final piece of software on the disc was the power console and application. This provides information and a management platform for all the different Raid devices installed on a machine.

On our test server, the software easily found the Enterprise 1600, and from here we were able to manage and create disc arrays using the configuration wizard function. Getting around the user interface was straightforward enough, although it did look dated compared with all our other Windows 2000 applications.

The card also has SNMP support, allowing any standard management package to deal with card via a suitable Mib.

The fault-tolerance features were good, with auto detection of failed drives and the ability to hot swap new drives without bringing down the whole system. It also supports the automatic and transparent rebuild of hot spare drives.

Contact AMI 020 8848 8686