[ANNOUNCE] Einarc - universal RAID management/monitoring tool

[ANNOUNCE] Einarc - universal RAID management/monitoring tool

[Mikhail Yakshin]

Hello!

I'd like to introduce release of Einarc project - an universal RAID 
management/monitoring tool.

Some time ago, I've started working with various hardware RAID 
controllers and quickly was disappointed by the fact that almost all of 
them require proprietary utilities to manage. For example, it's 
virtually impossible to monitor RAID status from running Linux without 
installing one on Areca, Adaptec, LSI, 3ware, CCISS, etc controllers.

Moreover, all these proprietary utilities were sometimes hard to find 
and every one of the have a different interface, command line options, 
etc. There seemed to be even no standard for entities hierarchy: Areca 
uses 3-tier hierarchy (physical discs - raidsets - volumesets), LSI uses 
2-tier one (physical - logical discs).

So, after giving it some thought and searching for a solution to unite 
them all, I've found out that there almost no such thing. ManageEngine 
OpStor is a proprietary and pretty expensive product that can do it and 
only other attempts in this area seemed to be OpenBSD's bioctl 
initiative that faded out in 2005-2006.

Generally, the idea is simple: Einarc works as a translator that makes 
it possible for a user to control all these devices using simple terms 
like “physical disc”, “logical disc”, “adapter”, etc, while 
transparently converting these requests to proprietary RAID paradigms. 
In fact, the system still uses underlying proprietary CLIs, but the user 
doesn’t interact with them directly, staying in a single, 
well-documented interface.

During its installation, it automatically downloads these proprietary 
utils (after reading & agreeing to their licenses), unpacks and installs 
them, and then, for example, command like

einarc -t areca physical list

would be translated into

/usr/local/lib/einarc/areca/cli disk info

then it's result parsed and returned in the same well-documented form as 
for any other Einarc-supported adapter.

I'd be really happy to hear any opinions / thoughts / feature requests 
on this project and I hope it would come useful to someone :) Einarc can 
be reached at

http://www.inquisitor.ru/doc/einarc/

for downloading and documentation.

-- 
WBR, Mikhail Yakshin AKA GreyCat
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