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Einarc

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.

Einarc architecture

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.

Downloads

Stable versions can be downloaded from SourceForge.net download page:

  • Einarc at Inquisitor SourceForge.net downloads

Development version can be downloaded from Subversion repository, using command:

  • svn co https://inq.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inq/trunk/client/lib/einarc

Documentation and support