[SGVLUG] Suggestions for business application server

[Rae Yip]

RAID5 can plenty fast if you've got a decent (battery-backed) RAM
cache in your RAID controller. This can work for anything up to the
most data-intensive applications - for those you should stick with
RAID10. Of course, if your drives are >1TB in size, you might consider
RAID6 for stability reasons mentioned previously on this list.

So long as you've kept your data filesystems separate from the OS
root, there's no reason why you can't rsync from RHEL5 to RHEL4. It's
a little more complicated if it's not cleanly separated.

When you say backups to USB hard-drives, I take that to mean regular
hard drives in an external USB case (as opposed to USB flash). I've
done that for desktops; generally anything worth putting on a server,
I'd copy to something more robust than a single external drive.

A long time ago, the storage/backup solution used at a company I
worked for involved EMC intra-array sync between primary and backup
LUNS, then spooling to tape off the backup LUNs. I'm pretty sure
you're referring to a different EMC solution, though. Perhaps Celerra?

In any case, a cheap NAS box or two is an excellent way to go if
you've got a reasonably fast network. There are varying levels of
price and reliability, of course.

-Rae.

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 1:54 PM, DYN: Jim Workman<JimW at dynashoe.com> wrote:
> We are planning to replace our current Dell RHEL 4 server (keeping the old
> server as a nightly-rsynced hot backup).
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> I’m looking for suggestions on some questions from those who have recent
> configuration experience.
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> Current system has 8 SCSI 73GB 15k drives in RAID5.
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> Has anyone replaced SCSI with SATA in high-reliability environment.
> (Non-SQL files with lots of record-based I/O.)
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> I have read that RAID5 is less preferable to RAID10 or other configurations
> due to its slowness.
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> Also read that it is better to not keep the OS on the main RAID array.
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> Are there significant advantages to go to RHEL 5, and can the backup system
> stay RHEL 4?
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> We are currently making nightly full backups onto DLT VS1 tapes.  (2 week
> rotation and archiving the Month-End tape.)
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> Because tape drive & tapes are relatively expensive, I am investigating a
> cron-driven backup to USB hard-drives as a replacement.
>
> Anyone doing this?
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> We have an option to make incremental backups to an enterprise-level
> hard-drive archive system, but I have concerns about restoring individual
> files from such a system.  Has anyone dealt with data recovery from
> EMCsquared?
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> Experience-based comments to any of the issues above are welcome.
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> Jim Workman