Question

Discuss the below in no less than 100 words.

a) Describe why RAID is an important consideration for your Linux server.

b) What version of a RAID would you use for a medium-size business? Support your answer with reasons for the choice. Provide the number of disks you will need to optimize your choice.

c) Additionally, indicate whether you would use iSCSI or locally attached drives for this configuration. Support your answers.

Answer 1

(*Note: Please up-vote. If any doubt, please let me know in the comments)

Part a)

RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is an important consideration for Linux servers because it provides data redundancy and/or performance improvement (depending on the version of RAID used). Without RAID, our server can suffer downtime if its hard drive fails, the downtime can last while the drive is being replaced. Thus by distributing data across multiple disk drives (which are usually cheap) in RAID we can protect data on our server from getting corrupted, or we can gain data access speeds at low additional costs.

Part b)

For a medium-sized business, I would recommend using a RAID 5 array. The reasons for this choice are as mentioned below:

1. RAID 5 provides increased read speeds as well as data redundancy by storing parity checksums for each data block.

2. If one of the drives fails, the server will still continue running with full data access, although at lower throughput, until the failed drive is replaced.

3. It costs lower than RAID 6 or RAID 10. Since the cost can be an important consideration for a medium-size business, so this is recommended.

Part c)

We would use locally attached drives for this configuration due to the following reasons:

1. With iSCSI, the network connection reliability & speed can limit the performance of our server's RAID system which will not be a good thing.

2. Local drive connections like SATA have much higher read/write speeds.

3. If iSCSI network connections are lost for some time, the data on the disk that got disconnected, will have to be rebuilt again completely to incorporate it back into the RAID system.