RAID5 for Linux

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 12:44:08PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
> hot-swap can be justified on a mail server at an ISP but not at most
> 9-to-5 corporate sites where it's easy enough to shut the system off
> for 5 minutes at the end of the workday.  Serial ATA can be
> justified if you need 15,000rpm drives because the system is
> handling 1000 transactions per second in a banking app, but not if
> you're running a Clearcase server for a half-dozen VB programmers.

These are excellent points, as are the others you make...  However the
cases you outline above are fairly clear-cut.  Where things get hairy
is where we play in the grey in between these cases; and unfortunately
that's where most sites fall in the spectrum of things.  It's hard to
know what is justified and what isn't.  Basically, I think in the end,
it's justified if the users are complaining about performance, and
management is willing to foot the bill.  What other criteria is there?

Another point is that often, you can split the load between several
lower-end systems, improve performance substantially for pretty much
everyone, and still save money.  But this approach is unintuitive.  We
tend to think that the file server is the file server, and that it
should have lots of fast, expensive storage attached for everyone's
storage needs.  Whether or not that's really necessary depends on what
you're doing, how many are doing it, and how clear-cut the devisions
between different groups' resources are...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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