RAID-1: It's Not Just for Servers

[PliotronX]

I just wanted to put this story here for others to learn from negligence of others being a liability that you might have to deal with..

One of the largest clients the MSP I work at takes care of has machines that seem to be dropping like flies and their criticality is only revealed when they fail. I had no say in their implementation and I'm sure most of you guys have stories like this. I was just about to call it a day when I got a frantic call about a system responsible for specialized equipment running windows XP on SFF dells in a secluded network that usually isn't running even SP3 or 2 based on the other sites. "The system won't boot" the caller says. "I need a dispatch right away, the hard drive is toast!" Gathering my thoughts, working the procedure of cloning the XP with a similar P4 or C2D platform to salvage the OS and proprietary software that I've done in the past, and equipment that might need to be used, I prepare for the 2.5 hour drive. Luckily I get another call a few miles out that they got it working.

Tl;dr My question is: is it too much to ask for systems that might maybe possibly in some capacity be critical for machinery to function to have RAID-1 and one spare power supply on hand? I don't often use the phrase "it ought to be a law" but I'm close here.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I just wanted to put this story here for others to learn from negligence of others being a liability that you might have to deal with..

One of the largest clients the MSP I work at takes care of has machines that seem to be dropping like flies and their criticality is only revealed when they fail. I had no say in their implementation and I'm sure most of you guys have stories like this. I was just about to call it a day when I got a frantic call about a system responsible for specialized equipment running windows XP on SFF dells in a secluded network that usually isn't running even SP3 or 2 based on the other sites. "The system won't boot" the caller says. "I need a dispatch right away, the hard drive is toast!" Gathering my thoughts, working the procedure of cloning the XP with a similar P4 or C2D platform to salvage the OS and proprietary software that I've done in the past, and equipment that might need to be used, I prepare for the 2.5 hour drive. Luckily I get another call a few miles out that they got it working.

Tl;dr My question is: is it too much to ask for systems that might maybe possibly in some capacity be critical for machinery to function to have RAID-1 and one spare power supply on hand? I don't often use the phrase "it ought to be a law" but I'm close here.

The vendor we buy servers from specs a pair of mirrored HDDs as a boot volume, by default.

If you're using a SFF Desktop running WinXP for mission critical stuff, well...

 

[thecoolnessrune]

That sucks, and I'm glad you were at least spared a tedious dispatch. If it's anything that's obvious in the industry, innumerable amounts of suffering will be gambled to save a buck. That's because the person who gets a bonus for saving the company money doesn't have to personally deal with the headaches of keeping the infrastructure going.

Our company has a (not universal) policy that if the equipment does not have an active support contract, then spares must be kept onsite. If they are not, the client must sign a waiver noting that they could face substantial outages for equipment failure, and we won't be held liable.

 

[manly]

Obviously any small business of virtually any size could and should have some key spare components on hand.

RAID-1 sounds like a no-brainer, but who would they do it on Windows? Chipset RAID isn't portable to another motherboard. Should they add the not insignificant cost of hardware RAID (controller + proper drives) to each "server" at the point of purchase? They probably should, but small businesses often don't think in terms of TCO.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Obviously any small business of virtually any size could and should have some key spare components on hand.

RAID-1 sounds like a no-brainer, but who would they do it on Windows? Chipset RAID isn't portable to another motherboard. Should they add the not insignificant cost of hardware RAID (controller + proper drives) to each "server" at the point of purchase? They probably should, but small businesses often don't think in terms of TCO.

Depends on how fast they want to get back up and what their recovery process is.

Chipset RAID isn't portable, but it doesn't have to be if you're primarily worried about an individual HDD failing.

You can save a LOT of money if you are willing to accept a couple hours worth of DT, and if your backup solution supports bare metal restores. Windows Backup does. Swap a new drive in, press a few buttons, and 2 hours later you're back in business.

 

[corkyg]

Agree with Dave. While you can't move a chipset RAID1 array to a different mobo, you can easily move the individual HDDs. I've done that many times. They are simply duplicates in normal format readable in any PC. And, you can move one of the drives, and rebuild another RAID1 array from it on a different PC.