Agreed, RAID is awesome. If your budget can support it -- and,
Ignasi, yours certainly can -- you should totally do it, unless your
machine is basically a thin client, which obviously isn't the case
here.
Agreed as well, RAID is not a substitute for backups. Although a
question for the group: how to people do backups these days on large
(multi-TB) data sets? I assume to hard drive somehow, but when you're
talking about 10-20TB, that's not necessarily very easy, especially if
you want to take those backups off-site.
At a former job, I once had the pleasure of being able to buy a server
from these folks:
Very nice machine, at am impressive price. I didn't stay at the job
long enough to play with it all that much, but I wish I had... I
doubt that you'll want to buy from them if the machine is going to
Spain, but it could give you an idea of what you can get for the
money. Of course, you could check Dell, etc., too.
How do people feel about multi-processor machines? I know little
about them, but if you've got a big budget to buy a fast machine, I'd
think that it'd be something you'd consider.
David
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 07:13:57PM -0400, Jeremy L. Gaddis wrote:
>On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Ignasi <ignasilucas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I expect between 4 and 10 people to use it at the same time. Most jobs will
>> be CPU intensive, but I can also envision some sporadic jobs to require
>> several GB of RAM. He also wants to store quite a bit of data there, and
>> maybe host a database. I assume that nobody would use it as a desktop, but
>> it would be accessed remotely. In principle, the main concern is to make it
>> a fast computer.
>
>Have you considered the potential benefits of a number of smaller servers
>instead of a single large server? I'm not familiar with exactly what you're
>doing, but it be worth investigating.
>
>> I've read a little bit about RAID arrays, but never met anybody who used
>> them. I'm interested in those configurations where data is mirrored, so that
>> the system can tolerate the failure of one of the disks. And I've been
>> warned that if all the disks composing the array are of the same brand and
>> design, more than one may fail at the same time. Do you think RAID is worthy
>> at all, or not necessary with a good back up system? what is better, an
>> operating system RAID controller, or a hardware one?
>
>If the data is considered important, RAID is a must. The data on my home
>servers isn't critical and no financial meltdown will occur if I lose
>it, but it's
>important enough to me that I use RAID at home.
>
>Steven mentioned hot spares. I'm also a big fan of hot spares, as the
>failed drive
>is automatically replaced by another (hopefully good!) drive and
>rebuilding begins
>(almost) immediately. Without a hot spare, someone must physically
>pull the failed
>drive and replace it before rebuilding of the array will begin.
>During that time, if
>another drive happens to fails, you will (typically) lose data -- this
>is dependent on
>what type of RAID you're using, however.
>
>Also, and I can't stress this enough: RAID IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BACKUPS.
>
>As I said, if a drive in a RAID array fails, you can pull the dead
>drive and replace it
>without (online) losing any data. Heck, I've done just that less than
>an hour ago.
>If, however, your data becomes corrupted/accidentally deleted/etc., RAID is not
>going to help you out a bit, and you're going to wish you had those backups.
>
>--
>Jeremy L. Gaddis
>http://evilrouters.net/
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