Einarc: Einarc is not a RAID CLI

Einarc is a part of Inquisitor platform, a universal storage RAID command line interface and an API that provides management for various hardware/software RAID devices, uniting them all in a single paradigm.

How does it work?

So far, anyone who wanted to manage a storage device had to download proprietary management utility, learn it and use it. There's no even single standard in the industry: for example, Areca uses 3-tier hierarchy while building RAIDs (physical discs – raidsets – volumesets), LSI uses 2-tier hierarchy (physical discs – logical discs).

Enter Einarc, a solution to unify proprietary storage management paradigms. 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.

Who would be interested to use Einarc?

First of all, system administrators who have a large variety of RAIDs/storage devices to manage and who want to manage them all in the single paradigm. There's no need to remember lots of cryptic commands to create volumes on particular model of RAID controller, it would be just one single and simple command like einarc logical add 5 100000 0:1,0:2,0:3 (that means add logical disc, RAID level 5, with size of 100000 MB and consisting of 3 physical drives: 0:1,0:2,0:3).

Second, Einarc is also a easy-to-use library that can be used in other software that needs unified disc management. For example, it is used in Inquisitor to test discs arrays, building and destroying various logical disc combinations under the stress.

Requirements

Build requirements:

• wget
• gzip / gunzip
• tar
• unzip
• ruby
• make

Runtime requirements:

• ruby

Recommended:

• asciidoc / a2x (to build documentation)

Licensing

Einarc itself is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Unfortunately, Einarc uses some proprietary command-line utilities to control storages. Using it means that you agree with respective licenses and download agreements. For your convenience, they are available in agreements/ directory. Please read them and agree before issuing make download command and using this software.

Standalone installation

Installation of Einarc involves following things:

• ./configure (generates Makefile.config and lib/einarc/config.rb)
• make to download all the proprietary tools, unpack them and build Einarc's files; you'll be asked if you've read and agreed to the agreements & licenses listed above.
• make install to install everything

Documentation

See reference manual for general usage recommendations.