on 3-14-2008 6:31 AM Therese Trudeau spake the following:
That is true, buy high quality stuff up front for fewer problems down the road. Not a sure bet, but a better one. In the half dozen systems I've been running at home for the past several years none of them have suffered a hardware failure of any kind(fortunately). I've been running PC Power and Cooling power supplies for about 9 years now, really high quality PSUs(last one I bought was about 4 years ago, can't speak for their quality now).
So for a top quality power supply for a mission critical desktop machine, which brand(s) would you reccomend? One of the towers I have is a Thermaltake Xaser 3 with lots of room, and I just bought a new Antec Sonata III tower with a 500 watt PS.
So BBU is certainly a nice thing to have but at least in my experience isn't absolutely critical.
Then for a Mission critical desktop machine, if you had to make a choice, would you go with a good quality UPS and/or redundant power supplies, or a BBU instead?
Of course for absolutely critical things I don't use server-based RAID anyways. Multiple redundant controllers, multiple redundant paths(to both the disks and to the hosts), is the way to go(assuming your application(s) aren't built to be able to run on something like a distributed file system). I've seen that some of the latest HP servers have dual ported SAS disks, which sounds pretty neat. I assume they still only have one controller though.
As an alternative to RAID1 for a mission critical desktop machine @ home, what would you reccomend? Maybe a bare metal restore solution able to restore to different hardware, (i.e. if a motherboard dies and drive crashes due to power spike or some catastrophe, I'm screwed if I can't find the exact same make - model)?
Explain your definition of a mission critical desktop. Does the entire enterprise stop functioning if this desktop stops? I am THE tech support for my company, but my desktop could die right now, and although I would be heartbroken and a little peeved, I could just fire up my lappy and get back to work in a few minutes. I usually have 2 desktops running, just in case I need to put out fires while my main desktop is doing the windows reboot dance.