My RAID and Server Setup

I was recently speaking with my good friend Max, one of the RAID recovery staff at the Data Clinic, who told me that they had written a new page about their RAID data recovery services (see www.dataclinic.co.uk/raid-data-recovery/), as their old page was getting rather long in the tooth and in need of a refresh.

 

Some of us don't use RAID or servers and instead use the cloud to store all our data. Regular readers of this blog will know my thoughts on the cloud - that it is inherently unsecure and that's why I don't use cloud computing to store my data. Instead I keep my files on RAID servers - my backup RAID is an HP Proliant and my live RAID is a Dell Poweredge system. The HP runs RAID 5 and the Dell runs RAID 10 (or 0+1) as some people call it.

 

Max has been good enough to let me pick his brains regarding RAIDs - I want mine to run error free and best it can and so have configured each system with a hot swap hard drive should any of the drives start to fail. I've also (another Data Clinic recommendation) set up a cron facility that runs a weekly disk integrity test and will alert me to any hard drives that are not running at the optimum levels. This will let me easily swap them out with new drives before they become a problem to my systems.

 

I'm using HyperVisor VM's (Virtual Machines) on my backup system (it's a system that hosts several of my sites too,and so using VM's is the ideal was of keeping everything safe and running it in software rather that having to configure multiple hardware systems do the same things).

 

The Poweredge is a dual boot Linux / Windows system. I mainly use Linux as I issue a lot of commands via the command line terminal, I use Windows applications to do most work related things though so occasionally I have to mix and match.

 

This is me.

Thanks for reading my blog.

I hope you find it interesting - please comment if you like.

Have a nice day.

 

Hard Disk Drive
This is a hard disk drive. These are the things that store all the data from your computers, tablets and phones. There are billions of them in the world, but most people know absolutely nothing about them.