Re: [BLUG] Large RAID config suggestions?

Well, I don't think I have anything very sophisticated to say, but I'm
inclined to agree with you about the 3x RAID6. By my calculations,
you'll get 18T that way vs. 20T in your other proposal. I don't know
what you're storing, but this is a lot of disk space, so probably no
one will mind that sacrifice. Meanwhile, the RAID 6 option does give
a slight emphasis to reliability over performance, as you wanted. So,
basically, I think I'm just saying "your reasoning makes sense to
me".

I hate to bring this up, but twice in my life I've been affected by
the failure of entire RAID arrays... Both were high-quality hardware
RAID setups, and people said of both failures "this is supposed to
never happen." In short, I recommend some other kind of backup in
addition to the RAID, because things happen, and if your organization
is concerned enough with reliability to consider RAID 6, I wouldn't
assume that something like this would never happen.

David

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 02:45:54PM -0400, Josh Goodman wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>
>I have a 24 x 1 TB RAID array (Sun J4400) that is calling out to be initialized and I'm going round
>and round on possible configurations. The system attached to this RAID is a RHEL 5.3 box w/
>hardware RAID controller. The disk space will be used for NFS and a database server with a slight
>emphasis given to reliability over performance. We will be using LVM on top of the RAID as well.
>
>Here are 2 initial configuration ideas:
>
>* RAID 50 (4x RAID 5 sets of 6 drives)
>* RAID 60 (3x RAID 6 sets of 8 drives)
>
>I'm leaning towards the RAID 60 setup because I'm concerned about the time required to rebuild a
>RAID 5 set with 6x 1 TB disks. Having the cushion of one more disk failure per set seems the better
>route to go. I'm interested in hearing what others have to say especially if I've overlooked other
>possibilities.
>
>I'm off to start simulating failures and benchmarking various configurations.
>
>Cheers,
>Josh
>
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