my life just got better

Smallguy

after 3 mnoths of dealing with older flaky servers we just got a brnad new HP Proliant ML370 3.2 ghz and 4gb of ram 2 73gb SCSI and 3 142 GB SCSI

so Raid 1 the 72 and RAID 5 the other 3


this is the first server I've ever had the oppurtunioty to build

kindda excited...kindda nervous considering the cash we spent on this

Non-Profit Techie

yeah mirror the first two drives and raid5 the rest. you should have a hot spare, where is it? and dont forget, even with all the fancy smancy raid, you still gotta be on top of your back up.

Smallguy

Non-Profit Techie wrote:

yeah mirror the first two drives and raid5 the rest. you should have a hot spare, where is it? and dont forget, even with all the fancy smancy raid, you still gotta be on top of your back up.

yeah we bought a an internal tape drive 400gb native and 800 gb compressed

we are gonig to order a hot spare as well just will need to wait till next year due to budget constraints....had to pull a few strings to get this approved

ms_visio

Smallguy wrote:

after 3 mnoths of dealing with older flaky servers we just got a brnad new HP Proliant ML370 3.2 ghz and 4gb of ram 2 73gb SCSI and 3 142 GB SCSI

so Raid 1 the 72 and RAID 5 the other 3


this is the first server I've ever had the oppurtunioty to build

kindda excited...kindda nervous considering the cash we spent on this

Good on ya! Although you should have bought IBM as IBM rules!!

Regarding the

so Raid 1 the 72 and RAID 5 the other 3

correct me if i am wrong. Isnt it advisable to have the same RAID version on all ur HDDs rather than having 1 & 5 ??

sprkymrk

ms_visio wrote:

Regarding the

so Raid 1 the 72 and RAID 5 the other 3

correct me if i am wrong. Isnt it advisable to have the same RAID version on all ur HDDs rather than having 1 & 5 ??

No, not at all. It's very common to use a mirror (raid 1) on your OS/System disk and striping w/parity (raid 5) on everything else.

Ricka182

Maybe I'm wrong, but if you have a good backup, why not use Raid 0, for faster performance...if there's problem, you can restore from backup....that's what I do...although, I don't run huge servers like that.....

royal

Ricka182 wrote:

Maybe I'm wrong, but if you have a good backup, why not use Raid 0, for faster performance...if there's problem, you can restore from backup....that's what I do...although, I don't run huge servers like that.....

More levels of fault tolerance equates to higher redundancy. Also, the time of downtime could be of essence. For instance, if you have a raid 5 and you have backups, if one disk fails, you still have your data up and running. There's zero downtime there and if a 2nd disk fails, you still have your backups.

On the other hand, you definitely could use Raid 0 alone and just restore from backups if a failure occurs. For instance, if you're clustering, you could just do raid 0 across the board because if one server dies, it'll just failover to the other cluster node. You could also do Raid 5 on both cluster nodes and have even have a higher level of redundancy.

It basically all comes down to business needs. Does the price of equipment come within the budget? Does the business actually NEED this high level of redundancy? If you have a few DCs that only serve the purpose of being a DC and nothing else, do you need some super high level redundant servers. or can you deal with that server being down for an hour or two while the other servers deal with authentication.

In short, it all depends.

sprkymrk

icroyal wrote:

Ricka182 wrote:

Maybe I'm wrong, but if you have a good backup, why not use Raid 0, for faster performance...if there's problem, you can restore from backup....that's what I do...although, I don't run huge servers like that.....

More levels of fault tolerance equates to higher redundancy.

Be careful not to confuse "fault tolerance" (RAID, Clustering, etc.) with disaster recovery (backups). They are two different things and serve different purposes.

For example, if your computer gets infected with a virus that wipes your data, multiple drives aren't going to help you. You need to clean the machine and restore from backup.