Jim,<br><br>I can't comment with statistics, but I've had a good run with SATA in our MSSQL environment. We replaced our SCSI servers with SATA servers and the reliability is great.<br><br>In the last year, I've only purchased servers with RAID 10. We've eliminated the IO issues that we had with RAID 5. Again it's RAID 10 with SATA; moderate virtualization.<br>
<br>We have OS only servers that run RAID 5. We use a SAN for volumes. The SAN is RAID 10.<br><br>When data has not been modified over 9 months we move it to a NAS box for archival (NAS-LITE). It's not the best way, as there is not governance for data retrieval, but the NAS box is a 4TB RAID 10 HP ML 370 that I've hulked up just for storage. If someone is looking for a file, we can usually find it with no problem. Our desire is to purchase a second SAN for data progression; at least there we'll have logic for retrieval.<br>
<br><br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 1:54 PM, DYN: Jim Workman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:JimW@dynashoe.com">JimW@dynashoe.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">We are planning to replace our current
Dell RHEL 4 server (keeping the old server as a nightly-rsynced hot backup).</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">I’m looking for suggestions on some
questions from those who have recent configuration experience.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Current system has 8 SCSI 73GB 15k drives
in RAID5.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Has anyone replaced SCSI with SATA in
high-reliability environment. (Non-SQL files with lots of record-based
I/O.)</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">I have read that RAID5 is less preferable
to RAID10 or other configurations due to its slowness.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Also read that it is better to not keep
the OS on the main RAID array.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Are there significant advantages to go to
RHEL 5, and can the backup system stay RHEL 4?</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">We are currently making nightly full
backups onto DLT VS1 tapes. (2 week rotation and archiving the Month-End
tape.) </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Because tape drive & tapes are
relatively expensive, I am investigating a cron-driven backup to USB
hard-drives as a replacement.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Anyone doing this?</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">We have an option to make incremental
backups to an enterprise-level hard-drive archive system, but I have concerns
about restoring individual files from such a system. Has anyone dealt with
data recovery from EMCsquared?</span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Experience-based comments to any of the
issues above are welcome.</span></font></p>
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<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;"> </span></font></p>
<p><font color="navy" size="2" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy;">Jim Workman</span></font></p>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Joel Witherspoon<br><br>LinkedIn: <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/jcwitherspoon">http://www.linkedin.com/in/jcwitherspoon</a><br><br>Facebook: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/joel.witherspoon">http://www.facebook.com/joel.witherspoon</a><br>
<br>Skype: joel.witherspoon<br>