On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 07:11:03 -0400, Nick Holland wrote: >There's only one RAID system that I think is anything close to as simple >as you desire: >... >> Accusys ACS-7500 or its competitors. >> No equity position in any of them. > >And yes, that's it. :) > >I'll admit to a lot of "sweat equity" in the Accusys ACS7500. I love >the things -- the simplicity, the fact that they usually "just work", etc.
Very true and for the record (quote me if you like, Nick) I have had my first "voltage excursion failure" involving an Accusys ACS7500.The power surge knocked out the server totally - it would not boot. The client had it delivered to my office where I found it dropping into ddb too early in the boot to be useful. I.e. before the first propeller stopped spinning :-) Splitting the system showed that the ddb crash happened on only one of the two drives. The other was a total disaster. Warranty replacement fixed that one. The other drive was pulled from its tray and inserted into a non-raid tray, jumpered as a slave, in my lab-rat. There I found that /bsd was exactly the correct size but cmp showed it to have two large blocks of nulls where code should be. Every other file passed an MD5 check (well all the ones I thought to include!) Replacing /bsd had the entire system up and running, albeit on one tray. They have another as a quasi backup but wisely they kept it out. using that is a last resort before a restore from the total backup archives. This should be a lesson that: RAID 1 (or any RAID really) is NOT a backup. It is a high availability system. High availability does NOT mean never unavailable. This was an exceptional event and the client is very satisfied with the outcome. The company is a large civil engineering design office so some appreciation of things technical was there to smoothe the process. > >As close as they are to "Just Work"ing, I still felt the following notes >are important: > http://www.holland-consulting.net/tech/acs7500.html > I missed seeing that before but I knew about the management stuff for the 7500. I had meant to hack on it before now but the pathway to Hell is paved with good intentions and I'm still fighting off the alligators in the swamp. I'll file it and I'd advise the same to others. Thanks again, Nick. In the beginning was The Word and The Word was Content-type: text/plain The Word of Rod. Do NOT CC me - I am subscribed to the list. Replies to the sender address will fail except from the list-server.
