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> Moral of the story: If you are depending on certain hardware features, you need to have a cold spare available with identical hardware and firmware. If you ca
by oarsinsync 6y ago
> Moral of the story: If you are depending on certain hardware features, you need to have a cold spare available with identical hardware and firmware. If you cannot afford one, it's better to either use a software implementation, have a really good service contract with the vendor or just let a VM provider take care of your infrastructure.
+1 for this. Hardware raid absolutely has its place, but if you expect to be able to rebuild an array without restoring from a backup, you absolutely need to have spare parts that are tested in advance.
Also, RAID is not a backup. RAID provides high(er) availability. You need to have backups still!
- anilakar 6y ago>Also, RAID is not a backup. RAID provides high(er) availability. You need to have backups still! Absolutely true. In this case we underestimated the workload caused by the service tag and firmware version issues and the fact that the new controller wanted to check and rebuild the array, when the disks themselves should have been fine. In hindsight it might have been faster to reinstall the OS and services plus restore the backups.
- ryandrake 6y agoI always thought the rise of RansomWare would put a nail in the ol' "RAID as poor-man's backup" coffin, but guess not!
- ggeorgovassilis 6y ago> Also, RAID is not a backup. You are absolutely right, but there are use-cases where backup is too expensive, so investing into robustness and availability is the only option left.
- barrkel 6y agoBackups give you a third thing: immutability. You can have a nice redundant storage for local performance and resilience, even geographic replication for resilience against a single site loss, but you need snapshots of some kind to protect against replicated destructive updates.
- nix23 6y ago>backup is too expensive, so investing into robustness and availability is the only option left. No please don't say something like that if you love your data. Raid is for the availability of your data, a Backup is the secure storage/versioning of you data, two completely different things.
- ggeorgovassilis 6y agoMy love for my data has a price tag :-) If I afford backup with this amount, I need to cut down on other expenses in my life.
- nix23 6y agoHave a look at some used LTO4 tape-drives ~40$ they can store up to 1.6TB per Tape (compressed) and are the perfect thing to offline your data.
- ggeorgovassilis 6y agoThanks. I looked at the specifications; it's not clear how that would connect to the server. All SATA ports are taken and USB is too slow (estimated 72 hours) for a full backup and would require 6-8 tape changes.
- oarsinsync 6y agoGood, cheap, fast. Pick two.
- nix23 6y agoUsed PCIe Fiber card or cloud-something like Tarsnap or Backblaze? BTW: For Tape it's REALLY important to have a steady Dataflow, too slow like USB is a big NONO, you NEED something like SAS/SATA or Fibre. The tape can but should not stop and wait for new data to be written. EDIT: Well then look at LTO5 (double cap)...LTO6 is probably still too expensive.
- ValentineC 6y ago