Subject: Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (
From: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com>
To: "Steinar H. Gunderson" <sgunderson@bigfoot.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <20051116185138.GA22831@uio.no>
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Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:08:03 -0600

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:51, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 11:06:25AM -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> > There was a big commercial EMC style array in the hosting center at the
> > same place that had something like a 16 wide by 16 tall array of IDE
> > drives for storing pdf / tiff stuff on it, and we had at least one
> > failure a month in it.  Of course, that's 256 drives, so you're gonna
> > have failures, and it was configured with a spare on every other row or
> > some such.  We just had a big box of hard drives and it was smart enough
> > to rebuild automagically when you put a new one in, so the maintenance
> > wasn't really that bad.  The performance was quite impressive too.
> 
> If you have a cool SAN, it alerts you and removes all data off a disk
> _before_ it starts giving hard failures :-)

Yeah, I forget who made the unit we used, but it was pretty much fully
automated.  IT was something like a large RAID 5+0 (0+5???) and would
send an alert when a drive died or started getting errors, and the bad
drive's caddy would be flashing read instead of steady green.

I just remember thinking that I'd never used a drive array that was
taller than I was before that.