[RumpRoast]

Does the new Xserve RAID have dual redundant raid controllers?

I'm looking for something that will preserve the integrity of data in case a controller dies. I know that controllers rarely die, but the data is important.

I'm considering moving large amounts of data away from servers and into a centralized storage area like the Xserve raid.

Any suggestions? Or am I way off?

[CatOne]

Originally posted by RumpRoast:
Does the new Xserve RAID have dual redundant raid controllers?

I'm looking for something that will preserve the integrity of data in case a controller dies. I know that controllers rarely die, but the data is important.

I'm considering moving large amounts of data away from servers and into a centralized storage area like the Xserve raid.

Any suggestions? Or am I way off?

This would be a server forum question

The new Xserve RAID has the same architecture as the previous ones -- everything in the box is redundant except the RAID controllers. So if one fails, you lose access to that volume.

Note, there is no risk to the data -- if the RAID controller goes, the volume goes offline, but the data is not lost. Just replace the RAID controller and the volume comes back online. So there's an availability issue, but not a data loss issue.

[Mithras]

The other annoying thing about the current architecture is that if you want a hot spare, you need to have one on each bank of drives.

So with a hot spare and RAID-5, that effectively leaves five drives' worth of storage on each side: 1250GB in the old XRaid, 2000GB in the new one.

[RumpRoast]

Thanks for the input. I got hung up on the xserve hardware sentence in the powermac forum :<

I'm intrigued by the possibility of moving the data of say webservers and e-mail servers to a central storage area such as the Xserve raid or other san device.

Thanks,
Jon

[power142]

Mithras: The chances of two drives within 7 failing within a short time are very small (although not non-existant). If you are near to the unit, then it's not hard to notice that a drive has failed... in which case, you could forego the hot spare. I've seen some impressive performance while in rebuild (after a drive failure), so that shouldn't be too much of an issue either.

RumpRoast: the support for multiple slices in the more recent Xserve RAID firmware makes it very flexible for such an application