This is my understanding of how it works:
There are two RAID devices in each box. Each device supports up to 7
drives,
and can use RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1, 10, 30, and 50 with these seven
disks. Now,
if you want to use the entire 14 in one gigantic RAID setup, you can do
that with
software RAID (you can do RAID 10, 30, or 50 across the two RAID
systems).
This is not actually terribly optical. It is best to use the two RAID
systems separately.
If you want a gigantic file system, you can use LVM and pull both RAID
systems
in (probably running RAID 5). However, how I really think it would be
most useful
would be if we had two database servers. One would run en, and one
would run
the international wikis. Since the RAID system has two fibre channel
ports, you can
give each system its own external RAID hardware subsystem in the
future. (so,
both could have up to 1.75TB of storage at their disposal).
In the near term, just using half the machine (7 disks, just one RAID
controller)
would still make a huge improvement, I think. It's not the cheapest
solution, but
it is a lot more reliable than hoping the disks in the servers don't
croak, and it
gives us the ability to move the database around fairly easily if a
server should
die (just plug it into a different machine).
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN
On Jan 12, 2004, at 2:35 PM, audin(a)okb-1.org wrote:
As to the Apple RAID boxes, my investigations a while
back indicated
that they are not really redundant. Each box is two seperate RAID
devices.
So you have to do software raid between them if you want to avoid a
single
point of failure. This may or may not be a problem, but is not
explicitly
mentioned in the apple literature. I'm not sure this is a deal
breaker, but
it is certainly something to think about.