Raid on a small machine (was: V5R2 and V5R3)

[Dave Murvin <davem@xxxxxxxx>]

Joe,

I have raid on my 25BG 270 just for the peace of mind (35GB without 
raid).  It's mostly a development box, but I do keep some of my business 
records, all of my product source, and customer license info on it.  I 
think I may have a smaller machine (P05) since I don't believe it cost me 
$5700 to get the raid feature.

I know we should all be religious about daily backups, but since this is a 
home office machine, most of the time it just doesn't happen on a daily 
basis, and I don't really want to potentially loose a full day (or more) of 
work (now what were all those changes I made to the code yesterday or the 
last few days?).

At 03:04 PM 8/3/2005, you wrote:
> do you think RAID on a 35GB machine is
> worth $5700?  If so, why?  I'm having a hard time justifying it in my
> mind.

From: "Jones, John :
(have to
assume when a drive fails, it'll be 2 minutes before the daily backup
starts).

I had just started a full system save about noon on the Friday before the 
4th of July weekend (before apply cum ptfs over the weekend) when I started 
to get the  "*Attention*  Impending DASD failure. Contact your hardware 
service provider now." messages on the console.  I was able to contact the 
local hardware maintenance guy, and he came out in the afternoon with a 
replacement drive.  He plugged it in and waited for everything to balance 
out before he left.  Nothing was lost.  If I didn't have raid, it would be 
"restore from backups" time.  I do store some of my tapes off site, and if 
the latest tape was at the off site location (I use a bank safe deposit 
box), I could have been out of business until after the weekend.

What will it cost you or your business if you don't have raid or mirroring 
and you loose a drive?  The drive I lost was the first one over the 3 
machines I have had (200, S10 and 270), so it hasn't happened very often, 
but it can happen.


Dave Murvin
DRM Enterprises, Inc.