[dba-Tech] Building a network storage device

Mark,
If I understand correctly, you are worried about 40 GB data.
have you considered to put in a SATA Raid 1 and in case the PC goes down 
jsut plug these two HDs into a different machine.
I think the bigger issue is to have all the software transferred to the 
other machine (or keep it on a second machine up to date), but just 40 GB is 
no problem.

Lembit

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Breen" <marklbreen at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" 
<dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2007 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: [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
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