[HCoop-Discuss] Finalizing Hardware Upgrade

[Peter Gammie]

Clinton,

On 10/11/2009, at 11:25 AM, Clinton Ebadi wrote:

> The board voted on Nov 8 to perform an in place upgrade at
> Peer1. <http://wiki.hcoop.net/Migration2009/HardwareUpgrade#OptionB>
> contains the specs for a hardware purchase; I think we should go  
> with a
> single PowerEdge 2970 configured similarly and potentially replace our
> IPKVM/KVM with a proper IPMI management console.
>
> We are looking now to nail down the final specs of the machines and
> purchase it within the next few weeks. I am leaning toward getting a
> hardware RAID5 and using either three 1TB or 500G drives for AFS and a
> smaller (lowest sized drives before the cost/G starts increasing)  
> RAID1
> for the local file system on the machines. Suggestions are welcome.

I am not a sysadmin of any stripe, but I get the impression that  
hardware RAID is asking for trouble.

Specifically, if the controller fails, then you may have to replace it  
with exactly the same controller if you want to avoid restoring from  
backups. This may prove difficult in a few years' time.

I'd expect software RAID to be immune to this issue.

> Now, if we offered significantly more disk space, how many people  
> would
> take advantage of being able to have essentially infinite space? I  
> know
> that I would actually upload a bunch of old photographs that take up a
> few gigs of disk space.

Bring it on. :-)

cheers
peter