[dba-Tech] Building a network storage device

Hello John Colby,

This is something that keeps me awake at night also, i.e., what to do if the
motherboard goes down.

I have a machine, with Raid 10, so I have stripe performance and raid
redundancy but if the motherboard (or PSU for that matter) does down, I
would have down time.

So, in my mind, the only real choice is to have some kind of clustered
machines, but this is something that I have only looked at, I have not
actually gotton around to creating a cluster of machines.  And I wonder what
the performance would be like on such a system.  Plus to build a cluster on
Windows environment, you have to use W2k3 Ent edition.  I have the software
but licences only to use them in a dev environment, not real production
environment.

I would not like to assume that if I pulled my raid controller out and put
it in another machine, that it would work, in fact, I sort of assume that it
would not work.

In summary, I have, redundancy with the disks, and backups of the data, but
no redundancy with the machine itself.

The data that I need to backup is about 40 GB, so what I am considering is
1) continuing to do my mag tape backups nightly and taking fridays off site
in case of fire or theft or flooding etc.

Then I am thinking of writing a small script to copy the 40 gb nightly to
another server, I would probably have an A and B folder on the live backup
server, so that when it is overwriting folder A, B is still nice and safe.
Additionally, of the main file server ever goes down, I do not have to panic
about the last tape backup possibly having failed.

In summary, the real secret is to get redundancy of the raid array, I am
looking forward to hearing if you acheive this.

Finally, as I write this, I have just remembered something.  The file server
that I am using actually had the raid controller on board, so that means
that if the motherboard goes down, I am 99% likely to loose the array...,
now I will not sleep.

Let me know how you get on the with controller pluging and playing in
another machine,

Mark