Darrin Chandler wrote:
If you're doing RAID for redundancy/safety then there are some things to
consider:
No. I am considering Raid, RAID1, in this case, mainly for *UPTIME*...
* with RAID, you should still do backups
I do my backups very well, thanks...
Point here is that I am not considering raid as an alternative to
backup, but as a way to keep the system up...
Please correct me if I am wrong, but when your drive fails you have
*TWO* problems:
1) you have to restore from your (well kept, well done, well designed
and well verified) backups (a big *IF*, if I can say);
2) the system is down until you restore everything;
So, either you have the luxury (or the need) of a hot spare machine...
Or a raid solution can /help/ you recover more quickly... or not?
Please note that although raid and/or backups and how they are
configured in respect to each other and how they are deployed is a
*very* fascinating topic (and I am *very* interested in hearing
everybody's ideas, opinions, experiences on this) actually this is an
off topic debate... Because my original question was indeed very narrow:
"Hardware or Software?"
I think we all got sucked into a very
serious/complex/fascinating/interesting/whatever issue, that of how to
make your system more reliable, in these difficult days of complex
network architectures...
But this is just a "can of worms"... I wouldn't dare to mail such a
question to the list...
You see:
- what if you have raid level whatever everywhere?
- what if you can implement hot spare machines?
- what if your valuable data is mainly into a RDMS?
- what if your disks are cheap and your cpus are expensive?
- what if your disks are expensive and your cpus are cheap?
- what if you are using VMs?
- what if you just use ZFS everywhere (sorry I couldn't resist)?
- what if you are on the "cloud" (sorry I couldn't resist)?
I appreciate your post, don't get me wrong, the problem of making a
network infrastructure rock solid and totally reliable is probably the
secret dream of every respectable net administrator...
But I think we must chop the problem in swallow-able pieces...
--
Mauro Rezzonico <[email protected]>, Como, Italia
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell" - H.Huxley
