Over the last few years, I've resorted to building my own servers out of barebones equipment for a varying number of reasons (beyond the scope of this article). One of my biggest hurdles has been deciding the storage architecture I want to use.
With the advent of the SAN, the hard drive requirements of the server have drastically changed. If I have a high powered SAN with dozens of high RPM SCSI drives that handle the bulk of the file storage, does the server need SCSI drives itself? If the server is running mostly from RAM and using the local drives for nothing other than log files and binaries, then the answer is no.
So the next question becomes, how do I keep the OS fault tolerant of a hard drive failure? I could go expensive and use a hardware RAID in the form of a card... I could go with a software RAID provided by my Linux kernel... Or I can use the BIOS RAID supplied by my BIOS...
Continue reading "Hardware, Software or Fake RAID?"
