48 Drives system - Raid 6 or Raid 60

What type of Raid 6 or Raid 60 should I use ?

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agentjase

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Hi there,

I have two Areca 1680x24 raid cards in my system, each has its own battery backup module. This is going to be used as a data storage for our backup/vms/shared folders.

Currently I have it at raid 60, Two arrays of 11 Drives Raid 6, 2 GHS, for total of 24 drives.

With Raid 60, it would give me 4 drives failure before my raid die, and the speed.

But looking at the reliability side, raid 6 is pretty solid, but when you add raid 10 into it, it became not so solid…

Hence, Should I do Raid 60 ? Raid 6 24 drives , or Raid 6 3 x 8 drives ?
With Raid 6 - 3x8 drives, I can combined them under Windows but why is that better?
 
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I would not store my backups in a RAID.

If this is for home use, I would not even use a RAID. If it is for work, you should have a professional make those decisions.

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I am usre someone will give you an answer you like.
 
As George said, bad idea for a backup. RAID controllers do add fault tolerance but they can never be a serious replacement for backup. Raid does protect from disavilability due to hardware failure up to a certain degree, the keyword here is availability. But imho this ain't a professional attempt if you still have a single point of failure. From my experience you can use raid 6 or Raid 60 or whatever raid you want (imho RAID 5 would be sufficient here) for advanced availability on low end systems with lower importance, but keep in mind availability ain't integrity or recoverability. On large systems most data loss does not occur due to hardware failure but rather out of idiot users accidentially deleting data, viruses and other more "human" hazards. If availability is a factor consider mirrored SAN environments, also get a good backup strategy.
 
tgrimley said:
What's wrong with storing a backup on a raid?
Click to expand...

No idea, disk to disk backup is what most people use these days, then you spin it off to tape or to offsite disk. Going directly to tape takes forever.
 
Sorry, let me be more specified..
I am currently using Starwind to make my setup as a mirrored SAN environment, HA setup, so data would be sync back and forth and iSCSI target would be highly available.

Well, I am the professional that's making that decision :p but I am seeking public opinions.

We already have a SAN environment setup from EqualLogic, but I am built one to replicate that one, while storing our VMs and images backup.

ZFS , can't. We're all Windows based system. NTFS ACL.
 
I would probably go with a 3 x 8 setup and then use FlexRAID in the storage pool (previously called FlexRAID-view) option to combine them all into a single share/folder. Just use the storage pool function and not the actual RAID functions of FlexRAID and you are all set... The interesting feature about this setup is that you could even have a second server with more RAID volumes that you can tie together into a single folder view with FlexRAID.

This way you get the protection and speed of the hardware RAID and the single folder view via FlexRAID.
 
treadstone said:
I would probably go with a 3 x 8 setup and then use FlexRAID in the storage pool (previously called FlexRAID-view) option to combine them all into a single share/folder. Just use the storage pool function and not the actual RAID functions of FlexRAID and you are all set... The interesting feature about this setup is that you could even have a second server with more RAID volumes that you can tie together into a single folder view with FlexRAID.

This way you get the protection and speed of the hardware RAID and the single folder view via FlexRAID.
Click to expand...

What happened if the FlexRaid storage pool crashed ? Since it is a software based program, does that means my file system would go down as well ?
 
treadstone said:
I would probably go with a 3 x 8 setup and then use FlexRAID in the storage pool (previously called FlexRAID-view) option to combine them all into a single share/folder. Just use the storage pool function and not the actual RAID functions of FlexRAID and you are all set... The interesting feature about this setup is that you could even have a second server with more RAID volumes that you can tie together into a single folder view with FlexRAID.

This way you get the protection and speed of the hardware RAID and the single folder view via FlexRAID.
Click to expand...


Btw, what's the reason behind 3 x 8 Raid 6 setup , is it this way is more durable ?
I thought if I do a raid 60, it is faster than a Raid 6 setup.
 
You want multiple raid 6 arrays. option 3 makes the most sense. This is true for various reasons. You can join them together in volumes, but multiple raid 6 arrays seems much better. It is easier to reintegrate 8 drives then 24 drives. it takes less time for parity to work and making consistency checks is also much less taxing on the system.

But in reality, you want disk to back up as many have said.
 
Megalomaniac said:
You want multiple raid 6 arrays. option 3 makes the most sense. This is true for various reasons. You can join them together in volumes, but multiple raid 6 arrays seems much better. It is easier to reintegrate 8 drives then 24 drives. it takes less time for parity to work and making consistency checks is also much less taxing on the system.

But in reality, you want disk to back up as many have said.
Click to expand...

Says if I have 24 drives available, I would need to assign 2 for global HS ? or one for each array ? How do you join them together in volumes under Windows without using FlexRaid ?
By creating a spanned volume ?
 
agentjase said:
What happened if the FlexRaid storage pool crashed ? Since it is a software based program, does that means my file system would go down as well ?
Click to expand...

The storage pool is just a name what the creator of the program used to call the View feature. All it does is combine the folders or drives into a single view, if a drive or volume crashes, only those files that are on that drive or volume will no longer be accessible. The storage pool function of FlexRAID does not have anything to do with your data integrity, think of it as a merging tool. It allows you to merge folders, files, shares, drives, volumes, etc either from the server the system is installed on or even folders, files, drives, volumes, etc
on other machines. Your RAID controller would be responsible for the integrity of your data. FlexRAID sits on top of the NTFS layer, which means that if FlexRAID should crash, you can still access all your files and data on the individual RAID volumes just as before.
 
agentjase said:
Says if I have 24 drives available, I would need to assign 2 for global HS ? or one for each array ? How do you join them together in volumes under Windows without using FlexRaid ?
By creating a spanned volume ?
Click to expand...

The problem with spanned volumes is that if one volume crashes, the entire volume is useless! Have fun trying to recreate the data :)

On the other hand FlexRAID handles each volume independently and hence when a volume goes down, you can at least still access the remaining volumes.

Think of the RAID volumes as individual disks, say you have 3 1TB disks, if you use the windows spanned volume feature, you will get a single 3TB volume, but with the drawback that if one should fail, all of your data is gone. FlexRAID will also give you a 3TB volume but treats each disc as an individual 1TB drive, so if one fails, you loose the data on the one drive but the remaining 2TB are still accessible. Hope this is clear enough :)

I should probably also mention that FlexRAID does not 'stripe' the data across drives but rather will write data to one drive (just as you would if you stored a single file to a volume directly) and hence if something goes wrong, you have access to the entire file.
 
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You would need for 3 drives in any one of your raid 6 arrays to fail in order to loose the volume. It could happen, but not very likely. You could raid it also, create multiple raid 60 arrays.
or create a Windows RAID 6 array from the various volumes. Here I am a bit out of my league, but I have seen technology similar to this that spans volumes and raids them and spans enclosures. Look at what a company called Intransa does. http://www.intransa.com/technology/vdmr.php

They have a niche market, so they are a bit optimized for it, but the theory is sound and it should work on almost any platform with out the optimization.

FlexRAID does sound like it could also help you.
 
Thanks Treadstone, it's clear to me now.

But in my situation, say that I am using starwind iSCSI targeting to dash out iSCSI targeting does it still work the same way ? I guess I have to play around with flexraid to see it right..
 
tgrimley said:
What's wrong with storing a backup on a raid?
Click to expand...

Raid controllers break corrupting entire raid arrays. I have seen this happen more than once in enterprise (hospital) environments (when I was not in control of the storage).

I do and would always use tape for backup even though it can be more expensive than disk.
 
drescherjm said:
Raid controllers break corrupting entire raid arrays. I have seen this happen more than once in enterprise (hospital) environments (when I was not in control of the storage).

I do and would always use tape for backup even though it can be more expensive than disk.
Click to expand...

I've seen this happen before as well.

A great quote I've heard on these forums before:

RAID is bronze, ZFS is silver, backup is gold.
Click to expand...
 
tgrimley said:
What's wrong with storing a backup on a raid?
Click to expand...

Raid is not a backup, period.

drescherjm said:
Raid controllers break corrupting entire raid arrays. I have seen this happen more than once in enterprise (hospital) environments (when I was not in control of the storage).

I do and would always use tape for backup even though it can be more expensive than disk.
Click to expand...

yup.

and as said above.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Raid is not a backup, period.
Click to expand...

No one said RAID is backup, you can certainly do a disk to disk backup onto another system with a RAID array, it's still a nearline backup of your data on a completely different system. Then you spin it to tape or copy it offsite for your offsite backup.
 
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