CAT | Hardware
I just finished reading a very interesting paper analysing data corruption which occurs at the drive level. Subtle data corruption like this is a nightmare for any system. Because it’s so hard to spot, it’s perfectly possible that even in a well-maintained system the corruption could occur on all backups, simply because it can go un-noticed for so long.
This paper demonstrates that RAID6 (ADG) is strongly advisable, not only for systems with lots of disks, but also for those with bigger disks. Many customers are put off by the disk space wastage RAID 6 creates – this paper shows that the extra expense is certainly worthwhile.
There’s a great article over at Forbes on the real cost of servers. The main thrust of the article, and something that shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who’s been working in IT for a while – the actual cost of the server is much less than the cost of running it, even when excluding IT staffing costs.
“One company’s IT department decided to invest $22 million in blade servers but forgot to inform facilities. The facility investment required to merely plug-in the blades was an unplanned $54 million. An additional unplanned $30 million was required to run the blades over three years. So what appeared to be a $22 million decision was really an enterprise decision of over $106 million.”
