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Re: [LUG] raid 1 and journalled filesystems



Bill Wilson wrote:

RAID 5
OK but serios degradation will take place during a failure.

Modern drives are so reliable failure tends to be due to
external issues (mostly operators bumping into disk arrays and
the like) with these failure models you assume more multiple
disk failures, although I have to say I've haven't seen any
multiple disk failures in the same RAID group yet<!>.

Raid 1 will not degrade the same way  in the event of failure.
However at least 50% of our failures are of the RAID card
itself or the controller in software RAID.

Eek - what RAID cards are these to avoid ? ;-)

We saw a couple of failures with clients failing to replace
broken disks in RAID-5 arrays at my previous place, so when the
second disk went..... 

If you are
concerned about this the only solution is RAID 10 with each
pack on a separate controller or at least a different channel
on the same controller.

Anyone done this on Linux? 

HP-UX does this really well, you just cable in an appropriately
configured disk array, fire up disk management software, and it
say (something like)

"I have found a second path to an existing volume, should I use
this in the event of an I/O channel failure Y/N?" (I wonder how
many people ever select "N" at this point ?! - Actually I know
for sure someone at Cap Gemini managed not to switch this
feature on for a client of mine - a case of read the manual and
THEN speak to an HP field engineer - they even had the same
configuration mistakes as were in the HP manual!).

Of course if you want to load balance across the I/O channels
(and you usually do), you still have to bail out to the command
line afterwards, and delete the primary channel, and do the same
procedure again <I guess that is an 9 out of 10 for usuability
;->

I've nearly always used the Data General Clariion disk arrays
for this in the past, but they are kind of past their
sell-by-date. They support redundant controllers, with an
auto-trespass feature, so will do the full monty of failing
between channels etc. Although it takes one machine I look after
2 minutes to completely fail over all it's Oracle volumes when
you pull the SCSI cable out ;-).

One I haven't used is the HP arrays with hot-spot(?) technology,
as I understand it, this is a kind of adaptive RAID, where it
try to tune the style of redundancy to match the use the machine
is making of it's disks. Anyone any experience of these?

Simon, trying to work around an Oracle "export" bug, which is
failing after about 4 hours zzzZZzzzZZZ, geez there were a lot
of export fixed in 8.1.7, that weren't in 8.1.6 :-(, I really
don't want to be upgrading Oracle just(!) to defragment a
database.

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