RAID setup for openserver 5.06

[blabelle]

I want to try for security and performance reasons some flavor of RAID on my SCO box. Can someone tell me the best most reliable one to use with this OS. Is software or Hardware best? Is the result worth the risks or is it riskier without it.

 

[pcunix]

The point of most RAID is to reduce risk from drive failure.

Only RAID 0 (striping) offers no reduncacy, and NOBODY does just RAID 0.

The type of raid you choose depends on your budget and how your machine is used, but IMHO software raid is always a bad choice. For hardware RAID you will need a card that is supported by SCO or that the mfg has a SCO BTLD for.

RAID 5 can increase read performance dramatically but decreases write performance so is not recommended where your writes exceed 30%. Some databases like Oracle do heavy logging and won't work well with RAID 5.

Simple mirrororing (RAID 1) offers redundancy and some performance gain; RAID 0 combined with mirroring offers redunancy and performance at high cost.

See

http://pcunix.com/Unixart/raid.html

for more.
Tony Lawrence
SCO Unix/Linux Resources

http://pcunix.com

tony@pcunix.com

 

[trunix]

One of the major features of hardware raid 5 particularly in a business critical environment is the ability to use hot swap discs (hardware permitting). A disc fails, the system continues to work - at a reduced performance - the disc is replaced, it rebuilds itself. The result - no interruption to system usage. The users are happy, the management are happy and the sys admin gets a huge performance related pay rise (I wish !!)

 

[pcunix]

Yes, hot swap disks are nothing less than wonderful- but that has nothing to do with RAID 5 particularly- you can have hot swap disks with mirroring and striped mirroring too.

Keep in mind that RAID 5 is not good when writes comprise over 30% of the disk activity. When it is that or less, RAID 5 is great- particularly if you have enough disks to saturate the adaptor and or the bus. Tony Lawrence
SCO Unix/Linux Resources

http://pcunix.com

tony@pcunix.com

 

[mezanine]

Does anyone know of a atomic clock sync program for SCO???