Skip to main content

RAID array Considerations - Any advice?



We just bought a Dell PowerEdge r510 (12 drive bays) that will fill the role of an archive server. We have 6 drives (1TB each) installed.



The plan is to have all the drives in a single RAID array and carve out an OS partition and an Archive partition.




We intend to expand to all 12 drives, but need to preserve the main archive partition when we do (i.e. we'd like to add more drives and expand the space available on the archive partition, not create another array or another partition to allocate the additional space).



Questions:




  • Is there a good way to do this (if at all)?

  • What would the preferred RAID type be if it's possible (5, 1+0, etc.)?


Answer



If I could suggest a slight modification of your plans:





  1. Put the OS on two smaller disks and mirror them.

  2. Create a second array, preferably RAID 6 with a hot spare, and make it a dynamic partition within Windows so you can expand later.



Don't dynamically expand volumes that are on the system disk. I've heard bad things about that. Keep the system separate from the data for performance reasons but also for volume corruption reasons.



RAID 6 is to counter the higher possibility of encountering a URE while rebuilding a failed RAID set. (Some good reading on the topic here, here and here over at the Storage Mojo blog). Even with RAID controllers that scrub drives looking for problems, I recommend an array that can sustain at least two drive failures before data loss. Thus my recommendation for RAID 6. The hot spare makes sure the rebuild happens as quickly as possible even if it's 3AM and you turned your cell phone's text message alert off in your sleep (if you haven't done that yet, you will someday =) ).




In addition, I'm sure you know that RAID is not a backup so it would be good to archive the data to tape once in a while and put it in a bank vault.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

linux - iDRAC6 Virtual Media native library cannot be loaded

When attempting to mount Virtual Media on a iDRAC6 IP KVM session I get the following error: I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and: $ javaws -version Java(TM) Web Start 1.6.0_16 $ uname -a Linux aud22419-linux 2.6.28-15-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 31 13:39:06 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2009 mozilla.org On Windows + IE it (unsurprisingly) works. I've just gotten off the phone with the Dell tech support and I was told it is known to work on Linux + Firefox, albeit Ubuntu is not supported (by Dell, that is). Has anyone out there managed to mount virtual media in the same scenario?
Post a Comment
Read more

ubuntu - Monitoring CPU, Mem, disk, on a single server

I've been looking for a simple starter solution for monitoring my [currently] single server hosted solution. Other than Nagios and similar, are there other good (simple) solutions people are using? Answer Everything depends on what you want. For example Munin is very simple, you can install and configure it in less then 10 minutes (on one server), it can sends alarms, make graphs from monitoring cpu, mem. apache connections, eaccellerator, disk io and many many more (it has many plugins). But if you are planning in future get some more machines, munin may not be enough. For example in munin you cant monitor state of individual processes, can't monitor changes in files (for security purpose). So if you wanna only see what is the utilization of basics parameters on your server and don't plan to buy some more servers Munin is what you are looking for, but if you wanna be alarmed when some of your service is down, take more control on what is happeninig on...
Post a Comment
Read more

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits, ...
Post a Comment
Read more