RAID Disk Arrays fro Redundancy and Fail-safe Operation on your Servers
One of the options that we strongly recommend for your servers, is using drives in a RAID array. In particular, using RAID to mirror your drives. That way, each drive is an exact copy of the other, so if one drive fails the other can take over.
While this is a very good solution, it must be monitored, that all of the drives in the array must be kept operational. Recently, we had a customer with an old system that did have mirrored drives. However, one of the drives failed a while back, and they did not do anything with it. So, when the second drive failed, then they were left relying on what was on their tape backup. Unfortunately, in this case, the tape backup had not been working, and there latest complete tape was several months old.
The lesson to be learned here, is that your system still needs to be monitored. If a drive fails on your RAID, then you are notified, and the drive should be replaced. If you have hot-swapable drives, then your system does not even need to be shutdown to change the drive.
For the customer that ignored their failed drive, I was able to revive one of their drives long enough to get their latest data from it. If you have a failed drive on your RAID array, do not trust in having this same kind of luck. Replace failed drives as soon as you can. If you do not have a RAID array on your server, contact us and we can get one installed for you.
Dave.