Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:51, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 11:06:25AM -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> > There was a big commercial EMC style array in the hosting center at the
> > same place that had something like a 16 wide by 16 tall array of IDE
> > drives for storing pdf / tiff stuff on it, and we had at least one
> > failure a month in it. Of course, that's 256 drives, so you're gonna
> > have failures, and it was configured with a spare on every other row or
> > some such. We just had a big box of hard drives and it was smart enough
> > to rebuild automagically when you put a new one in, so the maintenance
> > wasn't really that bad. The performance was quite impressive too.
>
> If you have a cool SAN, it alerts you and removes all data off a disk
> _before_ it starts giving hard failures :-)

Yeah, I forget who made the unit we used, but it was pretty much fully
automated. IT was something like a large RAID 5+0 (0+5???) and would
send an alert when a drive died or started getting errors, and the bad
drive's caddy would be flashing read instead of steady green.

I just remember thinking that I'd never used a drive array that was
taller than I was before that.