Re: Offtopic : Large hostings and colocations ?where?
On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 08:46:33AM -0700, Joerg Bashir wrote:
> On 5/11/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> 1,500 machines online, 4 drives/machine, a mix of PATA and SATA. 4,000 hard
> drives in cold storage. 500 hard-drives in boxes awaiting possible recovery.
> HOWEVER, your point is well taken. There is a difference between archival
> storage and production storage. I wouldn't have a problem using RAID5 or
> RAID6 on a production machine that had a derivative copy of the golden
> data. It can give you huge performance wins under certain loads. Backups,
> or original copies of the data are not something I would put on RAID,
> probably ever.
>
> Tape is lame and dead, so that's right out. That leaves disk. If there
> were an earthquake and your servers tumble over and their drives spill all
> over the place, I like the idea of walking into the pile and having some
> hope that a single drive has some amount of readable useful data on it. If
> Again, it's a stronger case for archival storage or of your only copy. i.e.
> at home, my mp3 collection could be sitting on RAID5, but it's not, it's on
> RAID1, so each disk is useful on it's own.
>
> Sincerely Off Topic with apologies for that,
No appolgies needed. Useful insight.
Could you define describe cold storage? Since tape is "lame and dead",
how do you handle drives for archival storage? Do you put a raw drive
in a cardboard box on a shelf, have them in removeable carriers?
On a side note, Lennart, when you have 1500 servers, how do you arrange
for console access to a server if required to solve a problem with bios
or early booting (before ssh is available)?
Thanks,
Doug.
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