From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Sep 8 03:11:07 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id DAA00411 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 8 Sep 1996 03:11:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from who.cdrom.com (who.cdrom.com [204.216.27.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id DAA00330; Sun, 8 Sep 1996 03:10:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.crl.com (mail.crl.com [165.113.1.22]) by who.cdrom.com (8.7.5/8.6.11) with SMTP id DAA00197 ; Sun, 8 Sep 1996 03:10:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from io.org by mail.crl.com with SMTP id AA07774 (5.65c/IDA-1.5); Sun, 8 Sep 1996 01:09:33 -0700 Received: from zap.io.org (taob@zap.io.org [198.133.36.81]) by io.org (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id EAA18037; Sun, 8 Sep 1996 04:04:56 -0400 Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1996 04:04:56 -0400 (EDT) From: Brian Tao To: Chuck Robey Cc: FREEBSD-HACKERS-L , FREEBSD-SCSI-L Subject: Re: Streamlogic RAIDION drive arrays In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 7 Sep 1996, Chuck Robey wrote: > > This seems somewhat odd to me. I thought you'd expend the additional cost > of RAID where you really need reliability. True enough... I was approaching a hardware RAID solution mainly from a performance standpoint. The need for a reliable e-mail server is obvious, but people often mention how news is "expendable". I disagree with that. A news server is just like a giant database server: it needs to be fast, big, *and* reliable. I have five non-customer feeds that consistently accept 90% of the articles I send then, and another four above 50%. If I lose even half a day's batch, I'm going to hear about it. Not to mention customers who get just as upset about losing articles from their favourite groups as if it were personal e-mail. > If you lose news (assuming this doesn't happen very often) you just > reload from another server, right? Assuming that some of your upstream feeds have spooled output batches and can backfill you the missing articles. > If you lose mail, it's gone, no backup at all. I'll be doing nightly backups of the mail spool to tape in case of catastrophic failure. With a projected 20GB of mail, this is going to get rather expensive. :( I read a study in some computer journal a few months back that warned of a 2x to 5x increase in cost to make an "normal" non-redundant system into a fully-redundant, high reliability, self-monitoring and self-healing server. I can start to see why now, just in the disk subsystem alone. -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org, taob@ican.net) Senior Systems and Network Administrator, Internet Canada Corp. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"