[dba-Tech] Building a network storage device

Hello Lembit and Gustav,

Nice to see you all.

Gustav, I may try this *nix option, if nothing else, it will give me an
excuse to learn a little about this new thing named Linux ;)

Lembit, The data in question is mirrored and striped, so I should not really
loose the data, but it is down time that I am thinking about.  Also, as John
Colby was mentioning, I would not feel 100% confident that I could plug a
raid controller into another machine and actually get back the stripe.  And
even if some one assured me that I would, what if the raid controller goes
down :(

So, my thought process was that unless you really have a fully redundant,
and mirrored, machine, you still have some risk of losing production time
and to lesser extent, losing some live data.  It is not the data that I
really worry about, it is the loss of production time.

I will look up the thread Linux file server backup now and see what is
there.

Thanks all,

Mark


On 16/02/07, Lembit Soobik <lembit.dbamail at t-online.de> wrote:
>
> 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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