[X Servers] XServe RAID 1 (mirroring)

[James Bucanek]

Peter Clarke wrote on Tuesday, July 1, 2003:
>Here is an interesting scenario:
>   You want to replace the faulty disk and re-raid.
>   The server has to be taken off-line,
>   The replacement disk fitted.

This actually surprises me.  I thought all of the drives in the XServe were hot-swappable?  As such, I would have assumed that one could hot-swap out a bad drive and let it re-mirror automatically.

>   The server booted from ANOTHER disk
>   (either firewire or CD)  (During the re-raiding process)
>   - You can't run off the second disk 'during re-raiding'

OK, that is somewhat nettlesome.  I suppose I could have a third drive as an emergency boot volume.  This XServe will be at a co-lo facility, so traipsing in with an external drive to plug in is not that convenient.  (Admittedly, if I have a drive die I'll be visiting the co-lo anyway -- so maybe that's not a valid concern.)

But three drives would, I think, be overkill for this server.  I don't need 99.99% uptime.  99% would be more than adequate.

Thanks for the feedback.  I'm thinking now more along the lines of two drives with separate, bootable, volumes.  I could install Retrospect on both and have the main volume backup to the secondary drive every 6 hours or so (create two partitions on the second drive, one OS and one backup volume).  A failure of the primary drive would only require a reboot from the secondary drive and a restore.  It might even be possible to accomplish that remotely if it's not a hardware failure.

______________________________________________________
James Bucanek       <mailto:privatereply at gloaming.com>