On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 09:49 +0100, Martin.Hepworth wrote: > Software raid isn't optimal....never has been
Amen to that, brother :) > Hardware raid is the way to go if you need RAID. In my experience also, and the more expensive the device the better it will be at handling faults. AMI/LSI MegaRaid and their myriad cousins - Dell PERC, HP NetRaid (as they used to be) and so on are boards I have way too much experience of, and that experience is almost always of the painful type. I've seen way too many controllers go bang and take entire arrays with them - those on this list who know which company I used to work for may well be familiar with that... I swear by NetApp kit, personally (although I'm not using any right now as $workplace is a Sun shop at the moment). Anything of that class - EMC, IBM, bigass HP StorageWorks stuff, BlueArc and all the competition - tend to be rock-solid when it comes to the RAID aspects of their hardware. Failed (or failing?) disk? No problem. Let me order you a new one from HQ. Failed (or failing) hardware? No problem, I'll let you know, let HQ know, and failover to the spare unit. Nigel mentioned Planet/Freeserve; I used to work for PIPEX. The whole mail infrastructure for dial/ADSL users was a Postfix/Courier/Perdition mashup using Maildir on NetApp filers for storage. The hosting mail platform (and later 123-Reg's mail also) was built originally using Exim/Courier with LVS for HA/LB and a pair of filers as the backend. I believe it's now using a BlueArc device, but times have changed in that business so it could be using anything! The issue with all of that class is the software surrounding the basics - some of it has become so complex that it can be very difficult to choose which one to use. Normal service will resume shortly :) Graeme PS. I did manage to mention Exim so it's not totally OT! -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
