It is fact. RAID is not designed to serve as a backup, it is designed for redundancy, to stop things going Pete Tong when a disk fails.. The first word in the acronym is Redundant... A backup isn't necessarily the act of keeping a copy of the "working" data, but a copy of data that may have just been deleted or lost through other means, i.e. current (working) data and past data. As Pook says, if you accidentally delete something on your raid array, that file has gone, that is how a raid array is designed to work. You would then look to a backup to recover that file. In laymen's terms your initial array (or just single disk) is your working system and then a backup should act as a never-emptied-recycle bin to get stuff that has been lost. Having a raid array on your backup adds the extra layer of disk failure protection. Having said all of that I don't use raid. For one reason, I don't currently have the money to put into another layer of backups. I have the data on my main machine on its storage drive, which uses sync toy to copy onto another drive in the system. Then over the network that is copied to a drive on my HP microserver, which then syncs to another drive on the microserver, so a sort of faux, not instant raid. Edit: I should also specify that I use the contribute setting on synctoy, so it is only ever adding new files.
Hate to say it but you are actually wrong, but it's a common misconception that RAID is a backup mechanism due to the fact that the most common use for RAID is storing backups. Backups are making multiple copies of data in multiple physical locations (e.g. on two PCs, two rooms or two buildings). Redundancy provides you with resilient services should elements in your setup fail (e.g. HDDs and other equipment like network switches, routers, internet connections). Other non-RAID redundancy options (in corporate networks at least) is teaming/bonding server NICs and making sure the load is equally distributed over multiple switches, that in turn have multiple routes back to the core switch, which has multiple routes to the routers and multiple internet connections. RAID != Backups
Seeing as everyone is talking about it, I'll throw my RAID setup in; My main server array (R5) backs up critical data to another array in the same box (R0 for now), then both arrays are copied to a larger NAS (which is full to capacity at the moment, HP Microserver I'm buying soon will probably replace it using 3TB disks) which is RAID5 as well, again with the "contribute" setting on my Acronis backup software so that old data is not written over in case of a file deletion error or accidental writeover on the main server etc. I don't want to post pics of it until it's all finished. It's quite makeshift at the moment but it's working well so far. If I can get it all tidied up and the networking finished there will be plenty of pics! That is a lot of stuff for one little box to handle! I'll probably have mine running a few when my new network is all finished up too, but not that many! Yeah I'm quite wary about liquid cooling servers/critical hardware too, but then again I've had a highly overclocked and liquid cooled Q6600 and dual 8800GTX powered folding rig acting as a webcast encoder/server for the Ice Hockey team for a season and a half, and in 2 years of 24/7 folding and a season and a half of Ice Hockey, it's never so much as "dripped a drop" of coolant! Industrial hose clamps Cheesecake! I've finally retired that machine for the start of the new Ice Hockey season, in favour of an i5 powered system which is much smaller physically, more power efficient and more powerful in general to handle the encoding software because we're going to try dual streaming at some point this season. @Fuganator: Love your server case mate, that's looking really sweet so far!
I don't have mine yet, so I haven't decided, but to be perfectly honest it will probably be the cheapest Highpoint card I can find to accommodate all the disks that I'll be using.
I would Love to build a home server / NAS but I don't really have any data that I need to keep that safe! Could I just buy 2 x 2Tb drives, slot them in my PC and set them up as a RAID array?
sure you can, a two drive array would be a simple RAID 1 solution which results in only a 2Tb of storage space as the other drive is just mirroring the data. I did this for many years, the really important stuff i still burn to CD/DVD or copy to an external that is only powered up every month or so. most of my bulk data such as music and films are just rips of the disks i own, so in the event of drive death i just pull my hair out and get ripping again. Took me a month of encoding 24/7 to do it last time on my Q6600.
Hmm well it wouldn't be a back up really as I would be using it as a storage drive for films / music. I need to think about this a bit more, only had my PC for a couple of months and have yet to move all my data from external drives and work out what I really need.
FYI If you want to use the backplane in the Microserver in conjunction with a RAID controller card you must choose a controller card with mini SAS connectors. The backplane is connected with a custom mini-SAS to 4 x Sata fan cable that also feed in power to each SATA assembly, this part would be difficult to replace or circumvent, ruining the hot swap facility. I went for the cheapest too but am very happy with my Highpoint RocketRAID 2680, its fake-RAID but the server still runs brilliantly and the management software is actually really good.
Thanks for that info, I didn't realize it used a propietary connector on the backplane. I would want to keep the hot swap capability so I'll try to get something suitable with mini-SAS on it.
My main bottleneck is RAM - luckily my VMs are carefully provisioned (see screenshot) so I can get away with the bare minimum. Also missed a backup mailserver off the original list, don't have the space to store all 2GB of mail on the public server, so port-forward IMAP back into home, using fetchmail/procmail and dovecot At the moment I'm running 2x2GB sticks, but eventually I'll upgrade to an i5 and ram (excuse the pun ) 8/12/16GB in there. Also might look at getting an 8-lane RAID card and expand to RAID10 for insane I/O Also upgraded ESXi and re-installed fresh to 5.0.0 last night, so no more 2TB VMFS limit, hooray! I can use my whole 2.7TB RAID5 array
It IS fact, and it's NOT my opinion. Back up protects you from everything, from deletion of files, to virus attack, corruption through hardware failure, and of course disk failure. RAID, especially RAID1 only protects you from disk failure. This is not opinion, this is fact. Example: If you had all your films, games and photos on a RAID1 disk, and nowhere else, thinking that the fact that being on RAID1 = back up, and I then come around to your house and delete everything, you have lost that data. Please explain how this is back up? I'm really not sure why you think this is my opinion and not fact. It IS fact. RAID was designed for redundancy, not back up. This is why all data centres back up their data, despite that data already residing on a RAID server.
we have already had this argument more than once, im not doing it again. sorry for thinking the users of this forum could take a joke and let sleeping dogs lie.
I'd like to post my server but at the moment it's less a "File Server" and more "Half a Server and some bits" after the RAID card failed the first time I tried booting up with a disk. And the mac I use as a Music Server had one of the jumpers fall out and can't start intill I get a new one for it. And the pc I was going to turn into a server to take over for the rackmount one had to replace my fathers desktop. So yeah my luck with severs is a bit bad.
No.. you're right... we have, and I should have taken it in the spirit you probably intended. When you've lost vast sums of money, and had your business balance on a knife edge due to data loss you get a bit sensitive about this subject.
Im just going to bump this back onto the front. An a side note I may have a 4ft cabinet making it's way to me so will have a new layout to post at some point
Nice Votick - I'm up to my elbows in planning a large scale fiber network installation at the moment (for a customer, not at home) so should be getting some nice pictures of fiber equipment and a couple of pretty powerful servers that we're building in the next few weeks
Late reply, but I've decided to move one of my own server over to ESXi this week and try to virtualise my RADIUS client, mail server and maybe a couple of other things like a torrent client and a small web server - any good tips on installing it or just go for it? Is it simple enough?
Make sure you use an Intel nic. Make sure all your arrays are configured on a proper supported RAID card. You can never have enough RAM
Actually the box that I'm considering putting it on is a simple XP running network share host at the moment. No arrays on it, just a few 2TB shared drives. It's becoming pretty useless though, because it's just a backup of a backup and seems like an unnecessary thing to have running all the time. I think it'd be put to much better use with a few VMs on it. I'll have to check on the NIC, it's running a dual core i3 and 4GB of memory, basically the same spec as my actual file server with a different storage configuration. [edit] It's a Realtek NIC. Is that bad? :/
