Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1996 04:04:56 -0400 (EDT) From: Brian Tao <taob@io.org> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Cc: FREEBSD-HACKERS-L <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>, FREEBSD-SCSI-L <freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Streamlogic RAIDION drive arrays Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.92.960908034759.14220N-100000@zap.io.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.95.960907185744.30216K-100000@fiber.eng.umd.edu>
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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"
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