From: James B. Byrne <byrnejb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> We have a cold server with 32Gb RAM and 8 x 3TB SATA drives mounted in hotswap
> cells. The intended purpose of this system is as an ERP application and DBMS
> host. The ERP application will likely eventually have web access but at the
> moment only dedicated client applications can connect to it.
>
> I am researching how to best set this system up for use as a production host
> employing RAID. I have read the (minimal) documentation respecting RAID on
> the RedHat site and have found and read a few online guides. Naturally, in my
> ignorance I have a bunch of questions to ask and I probably have a bunch more
> that I should but do not know enough yet to ask.
>
>> From what I have read it appears that the system disk must use RAID 1 if it
> uses RAID at all. Is this the case? If so, is there any benefit to be had by
> taking two of the 8 drives (6Tb) solely to hold the OS and boot partition?
> Should these two drives be pulled and replaced with two smaller ones or should
> we bother with RAID for the boot disk at all?
>
> Given that one or two drive bays will be given over to the OS what should be
> the configuration of the remaining six? It appears from what I have read that
> RAID 5 is the only viable option. It also appears that the amount of storage
> available on a RAID5 array with N members is N-1/N. I also read that as the
> number of members increase both latency and the risk of data loss increases.
> As the amount of disk space we have in this unit (24Tb) is greater than the
> total storage of all our existing hosts it appears that a RAID5 array of 5
> units would leave at least one hot spare in the chassis and two if the OS is
> put on one disk.
>
> Alternatively, the thought comes to mind that we could do a RAID1 with two
> RAID5 arrays each of which have 3 drives. Whether one would actually want to
> do that seems to me a bit questionable but it seems to be at least possible.
For some storage servers, we put used the following cards with 2 small drives for the system:
http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=1134
But do you really need 10+ TB for your ERP+DBM?
I'd just go with a RAID10 for DBs...
JD
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