Re: HP proliant ML115 G5 on debian lenny
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 02:10:41PM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
Thank you very much for your reply!
> Well, debian has different requirements re licensing of modules. Your
> guess may be wrong if HP has provided a propriatary module for the
> kernel that e.g. suse has included in its kernel but debian can't
> include. For some things (e.g. the nVidia driver), you can still get an
> install done and add a module later; for the boot drive that becomes a
> bit of a problem :)
My plan is to use the 250G harddrive as system drive and use 2x1T
dardrives to do RAID 1 backup for several other servers. So what do you
mean by 'for the boot drive'?
>
> So-called 'fake' raid is, as I understand it, hardware that allows you
> to configure the raid in the bios, but the actual raid happens in
> windows software rather than in the hardware.
>
Could you please explain 'in windows software' a little bit? Does that
means the processing for raid is done in CPU rather that in the RAID
controller?
> > And the server will merely be used for backup.
>
> A couple of issues then.
>
> 1. Performance may or may not be an issue, depending on how many
> other computers will be using the server for data backup at the
> same time.
three linux servers(1 development server 1 mail and web server and 1
misc server) will be backing up their data to the back up server I
purchase.
>
> 2. With hardware raid, unless the raid card can save the
> configuration to each disk in the array, if something happens to
> the card (which could happen if a drive fails and takes down the
> controller), then the whole array could be caput if you put in a
> new controller card.
So this must be the downside of using hardware RAID?
>
> 3. With software raid, the configuration is on the disk itself.
> Pop those disks in a new box and they should work (assuming that
> the new box's hardware can be booted by the old box's initrd).
This is great!
>
> 4. Hardware raid comes into its own with exotic raid types (e.g.
> raid50 or raid60), with hot spares, hot swap, auto rebuild, etc.
I will only use raid 1, that is because this is simple and effective as
it appears.
>
> 5. There has been some talk recently here on the increased
> liklyhood of raid failue after a single drive failure.
> Apparently, the time it takes for a replacment second drive to
> rebuild makes the liklihood of the other drive failing before
> the rebuild is complete of some concern with very large drive
> sizes. In this case, having three active raid1 drives with a
> hot spare (4 drives total) is one way to mitigate this risk.
This is alarming, I will do more research to come up with a plan.
>
> You may need to do lots of research depending on:
>
> 1. The size of your backup set
I will do a careful check and estimate later on.
>
> 2. The importance of the data
mailing list archives, web data, database, svn repos.. home
directories.. They are very important and I can not afford to lose any
of them.
>
> 3. The number of locations of the backup data.
>
What do you mean by this? Is it ok to put all of the backup in one
backup server?
Again, Thank you very much!
Regards,
--
Zhengquan
Reply to: