netapp filers are not only redundancy enabled, but are also hot swappable and remotely diagnosable. meaning that if a disk goes bad, the filer switches to a good disk, then sends an email to the site's netapp service rep, who comes over and swaps the bad disk with another good disk. meanwhile, no interruption of service, no downtime, no sysadmins, no headaches.
I talked with my friend a bit more and have some clarifications on my original post. Apparently, their Filer did not have the capability to hot swap the bad disk with another good disk. Instead, RAID 5 rebuilds the disk when it fails, which uses up a lot of CPU and time. With RAID 0+1, which their SAN device uses, the drive that failed can be pulled out and replaced. Not so in RAID 5. Do you have any references for your statement above? I hope you're right and my friend is wrong <gg>
Thanks,
Justin |
