[CentOS] 8-15 TB storage: any recommendations?

Wed Jan 13 14:04:50 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
>>>
>> Please tell more about your hardware and software. What distro? What
>> kernel? What disk controller? What disks?
> 
> Both of my data-points are several years old so most of the details are lost 
> in the fog-of-lost-memories...
> 
> Both were on desktop class hardware with onboard IDE or SATA. If I remember 
> correctly one was on CentOS(4?) and one was on either an old Ubuntu or a 
> classic debian (atleast we're talking 2.6 kernels).
> 
> My main point was that, nope, linux-md is not the holy grail either.

But it does have the advantage of not adding _extra_ things to break. If your 
CPU/RAM/disk controller fail you are pretty much dead anyway, and with md you 
can move the disks/array to a new system without having to match the exact 
controller.  With md raid1 you can access any single disk directly if that's all 
that still works.

> The only storage products that I've not had fail me tend to be either:
>  1) Those that are too new (give them time)
>  2) Those that I havn't tried (in scale) yet (which always gives a strong "the 
> grass is greener on the other side feeling")

Everything breaks eventually (or has fire/flood/earthquake damage).  Backups and 
redundancy are the only solution to that.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com