Server Configuration

[Leon Shen]

Hi All,

Just need some help in backup solution. Currently customer have a ML350 G4 with total 5 hard disk of which 2 hard disk will be used as system disk and 3 as data disk configured as RAID 5.

Understand that have 2 channel raid card that can be use, normally system can configured 2 hard disk = system hard disk as RAID 1(mirrored) n 3 hard disk = DATA disk as RAID 5.

Unfortunately this solution wass not the case customer want. Customer dont want RAID 1 to be done on system disk (customer want the user to be able to control when to do backup mirroring for example only after major changes in System or after application installed on system and also RAID 1 might slow down the performance of server as constant writing on be done on 2 hard disk).Customer only want the DATA hard disk to be on the RAID 5. Thus customer will need the 2 disk cage for system disk. The backup will be done by Guardian XC2000. Can I ask is there a backup solution or software can do such way. Customer run win2k on ML350 G4.

Best regards
Leon

[Gus Kwong]

Hi Leon,

I don't think there is any performance impact if you choose to use SA64x/xx controller with Battery-Backed Cache, if your G4 is high-performance or bought with Duplex backplane... Even though RAID1 setup has 2 disks on a dedicated SCSI channel, your hard drive will never reach the peak of I/O throughput...

Of couse, you can always have a RAID0 on one disk within a single dedicate SCSI channel (which is not ideal at at) and back it up with the software that you have mentioned. Or you can use other disk-imaging software like Acronis True Image for similar nightly task.

cheers,