[dba-Tech] Building a network storage device

Lembit Soobik lembit.dbamail at t-online.de
Sat Feb 17 06:11:55 CST 2007


Hi Mark,
what I dont see yet is, why striped? why not simply mirrored Raid 1?
that should be easy with your 40 gig, even if you need 400 gig.

I have a machine with mirrored 2x 280 G IDE and have recently added a SATA 
drive.
each time I turn the machine off, it makes an Image of the C-partition 
(Windows and programs) to one partition of the SATA.

in case both IDEs would fail I can put the image onto the SATA first 
partition and boot from that.

The data backup is taken care of with a different procedure.

Lembit

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Breen" <marklbreen at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" 
<dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2007 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: [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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