Can SAN server immediately recover OS drive? 1

[Odis]

We have a vendor proposing setting up a SAN server to backup our data drives for MS SQL Server and NOT use a RAID solution. Question is this. If the OS disk drive fails, can any SAN server automatically recover the Operating System the same as a data drive? In other words, if the OS drive fails witout a RAID setup, will the server stay down until a new drive is put in and the OS restored or can a SAN keep the OS running the same way it does data drives? I'm still a novice on this stuff so excuse my stupidity. Thanks.

 

[ibmtech65]

Don't work with SANs but I believe it is the same concept. Just a Fibre connection to disk arrays so I would have to say if you did not have a raid running on the SAN drives it would be JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and nothing to recover against. If you lost a drive you lost the data on that drive and there is no parity stripe on any other drive to recover with.

 

[xmsre]

Boot from SAN + Replication.

 

[Bastch]

Most of the SAN Units run Raid sub-System (0 to 50 depending on size of the units). Most will run multiple arrays with various amounts of logical drives per array.

As long as the vendor sets Raid level on the Arrays to 1 or higher you will have Disk Failure protection.

Link Failure (Damaged cable, etc) can be reduced using IBM MPIO (RDAC) driver to provide multipe IO Paths from server to Storage (Multiple Compatable HBA Cards Needed)

SQL replication will help in case of data or array corruption to some degree