Hardware Recommendations for LTSP

[Warren Togami]

The Linux Terminal Servers will have ATA100 software RAID 5 arrays, unless I
can find better hardware RAID support.  I'm avoiding SCSI to decrease costs,
and ATA100 RAID is great as long as you don't mind losing hot swap
capability.

I know some of you will try to mention the HPT-370 and Promise Fastrak 100
cards.  They don't have Linux support in hardware RAID mode.  Both companies
refused to give specifications to Alan Cox and Andrea Arcangeli.  If you
have hardware RAID devices under both cards, Linux will see all drives as if
they were single disks.  I haven't found any hacks around this.  3Ware has
an IDE RAID card with great Linux support, but it doesn't have RAID 5.

I'm sure that ATA100 software RAID 5 should suffice.  Probably going to use
Reiserfs too.

I am not concerned with disk failure due to the RAID 5 arrays, but I am
concerned about losing data due to crackers.  We need mass off-machine
storage for archives of all the user data saved in the home directories.
This may very well be 60GB+ in size, so we need tape drives.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Beeson" <beesond001 at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 10:20 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: Hardware Recommendations for LTSP


Warren,

I don't know much about high volume tape drives, and I don't know  if
the cost is worth the trade off or not, but have you considered a RAID
array???
 Perhaps you could mirror (RAID one I think) two RAID 5 systems with a hot
spare for less money, or even approximately the same cost, but also not have
to
do all the management of the archiving...

I also read an article in the Linux Journal where a university lab
built a backup gadget that used linux on an old computer to back up several
machines at night...    While this article specifically focuses on backing
up
Windoze boxen  over a LAN, the principle may be valid for your use as well.
You may even get to skip the Samba stuff ;-)

The article can be found here:

http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/Magazines/LJ80/4360.html

If you can't get it, try to find the Dec 2000 issue, that's the other place
to
find it...

Good Luck,

Ben