Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
On 1/6/2011 8:09 AM, Timo Schoeler wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > thus Digimer spake: >> On 01/06/2011 03:27 AM, Felix Frank wrote: >>>> In any case, be sure to have (at least) RAID 1 on each node backing the >>>> DRBD devices to help minimize downtime. Drives fail fairly frequently... >>>> software RAID 1 is an inexpensive route to much better uptime. :) >>> If the budget isn't severely restricted, I'd also throw in an actual >>> RAID controller, software RAID being an unnecessary pain. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Felix >> If I may provide a counter-point arguing in favour of software RAID; >> >> With hardware RAID, you array and your data is bound to that controller. >> Should the controller fail at some point, you will find yourself >> scrambling trying to find a compatible controller, and you will be down >> until you do (shy of falling back to recovering from backup). I had this >> happen to me enough that I now won't use hardware RAID unless it's for >> performance (or similar) reasons the make software RAID unfeasible. >> >> With software RAID, you have a familiar set of tools (mdadm) that many >> people can help you with. More importantly though, you can move your >> array to almost any other machine and get it up and running again with >> relatively little effort, potentially dramatically reducing your mean >> time to recovery. > I may add that in most cases management as well as performance > monitoring of a software will run like a charm compared to most > solutions and tools vendors offer - regardless of what OS you use. > >> Cheers! > Thanks for the suggestions. I've been using linux software raid for years, and I've been very pleased with the results. Never lost a bit actually :) After doing some research, I've decided to hold off on the SSD drives until I get the system up in a state that can be tested with the platter-based hard drives. After doing a lot of reading (like anandtech.com), I'm worried about the long-term stability of SSD devices. Also, the price differences between the "consumer-grade crapware" and "enterprise-level sweetness" is pretty big. I was looking at getting some ocz vertex 2's, but stability concerns really scared me. I don't think x25's are in my budget (for the size I want). I'm going to set it up first with platter-based HDD's (4 total, each host with raid1). Have 1 MD device (PV) running under lvm with 3 lv's. One for system partition, one for app1 that will be under drdb and one for postgresql and mysql that will be under drdb. If needed, I'll throw in 4 more disks, make another vg and migrate postgresql/mysql data to that. Again, Thanks for all your recommendations! J