Yeah those big disks arrays are real sweet.
One day last week I was in a data center in Arizona when the big LSI/Storagetek
array in the cage next to mine had a hard drive failure. So the alarm shrieked
at like 13225535 decibles continuously for hours. BEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP.
Of course since this was a colo facility it wasn't staffed on site by the idiots
who own the array. BEEEEP BEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEP for hours. So I had to stand
next to this thing--only separated by a few feet and a little wire mesh--while
it shrieked for hours until a knuckle-dragger arrived on site to swap the drive.
Yay.
So if you're going to get a fancy array (they're worth it if somebody else is
paying) then make sure to *turn off the @#%@#SF'ing audible alarm* if you deploy
it in a colo facility.
Quoting Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com>:
> 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.
>
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