on Mon, Apr 22, 2002, hanasaki (hanasaki@hanaden.com) wrote:
I guess my main two goals are:
- 100% hardware ide raid
Many solutions available.
- Ability to go to a new card and not need to do a tape restore
While appreciated there are several options:
- Some hardware does support array swapping. I've upgraded between
major versions of 3Ware, but only after checking with tech support.
- Backups are not optional. If you're restructuring your storage,
best practices requires you have a current, verified, backup image
on hand.
- There are several backup alternatives. Tape is one. Networked
archive, or local archive, are others. In our case, we keep both
network backups, and aquired a 120 GiB drive for the express
purposes of (1) providing alternate storage while a RAID array was
tested and rebuilt, and (2) providing backup from which the array
could be restored. Cost of storage was ~350, cheap insurance given
the value of the data (4x80 GiB array, RAID5, ~50% utilized).
If you're planning on making an array transition without backups, I
strongly discourage this. There are too many things that can go wrong,
and you have no safety net.
Peace.