> I am surprised at your e-mail, and am very disappointed at your
> demeanor....
I myself am rather surprised as well, since this has been a FOUR MONTH
conversation with Adaptec..
> We here at Adaptec are doing all we can to provide you as much
> documentation as we possibly can in the timeframe that makes the most
> sense for both of us....and we had provided you documentation before on
> our driver,
I am unaware of any other Adaptec RAID documentation having been provided
to OpenBSD.
> but what you are seeking now is more source information
> regarding our GUI management, etc...
We are not asking for "source". We are asking for information as to
how to communicate with the controller so that it can perform the job
that it is advertised to perform. Your controllers are NOT performing
at the moment because you do not let vendors communicate with the RAID
management components.
> I can understand you seeking this, as you as well as many other flavors
> of Linux/Unix are looking for the same thing...and though we would like
> to support "all" of the various flavors of these new operating systems,
> we can't do so in an economic fashion, as support for "all" of these
> varying flavors is just not possible...
We are not asking for support. We are asking for documentation.
Back when we asked for documentation for the Adaptec SCSI products,
Adaptec also translated that to mean "support". We did not want
support! Then Adaptec gave us documentation.
Are you telling customers that unless they run an Adaptec approved
operating system ("supported") that they should NOT buy Adaptec RAID
products?
Are you willing to start accepting returns for Adaptec RAID products
that customers have... which are not performing the tasks that RAID
controllers are expected to perform?
> But, help is on the way....
>
> We are coming out with an entire new rev of our firmware with the
> upcoming SAS/SATA-2 release in the July timeframe, and our plan is to
> provide a Software Development Kit (SDK), which will be generic in
> nature, and will have the documentation in hand that will help you to do
> the work on your side to continue to expand the support for Adaptec
> products in your OpenBSD OS....
And this scares us. A new firmware? That must be loaded onto a card,
for RAID management to work? And what of all the cards that are out
there now?
>From my viewpoint, the goal here is to make it harder to run on
operating systems other that Windows.
Why don't you just give us the Adaptec RAID management firmware
documentation in some form before we just either
1) Reverse engineer it
or
2) Entirely cease supporting Adaptec RAID controllers.
There are other choices on the market.
> Until then, you will need to be patient, as we are getting closer, but
> not fully there....
I heard a timeline of releasing such an SDK in July. If that is the
case, the earliest we would be able to include RAID management support
is likely May 2006 (misc readers: because the SDK would arrive after
our hackathon).
Should we tell everyone who is running Adaptec RAID to choose other
products until such time?
Should we tell the people (who we both know) running with over a million
dollars worth of Adaptec RAID cards to ... simply trust their RAID arrays
will not lose a drive?
What is your message for those large customers who believed they were
buying a product that would give them greater uptime?
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