COMPUTER SUPPORT Tips from the GONZALES, LA Computer Pro – Why You Should RAID Your Servers

When setting up a server, pretty much everyone is in agreement: the worst possible thing that could happen is a total hard disk crash, which would lose a great deal of data – at least until a backup were restored.

Providing COMPUTER SUPPORT GONZALES, LOUISIANA gives us many opportunities to see network configurations of all sorts, and there’s one solution to this risk that we simply don’t see often enough: a RAID implementation on the server. Small businesses, while they recognize the value of backups, are frequently slow to see that the time necessary to restore a backup is still a major liability – that if a hard drive crashes, it takes time to buy and install a replacement, and then the backup needs to be restored.

RAID 5 makes recovery from a single hard drive crash simple. Modern RAID setups can even provide hot-swappable replacements, so the server never needs to go down – even for a second – while crashed drives are replaced. While you do lose some hard drive capacity compared to simply installing the drives as provided, the added security more than makes up for it… and disk drives are inexpensive.

Several clients for COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA ask how to reduce their risk of downtime, and RAID 5 provides one of the simplest ways to almost eliminate all risk. With RAID 5, a series of three or more hard disks provide the equivalent storage space of two disks… while improving disk performance and preventing drive failure. Any number of disks may be used, and only a single disk’s capacity is lost – assuming all disks are the same size, which is frequently the case and sometimes a requirement.

During use, information is “striped” across the disks, and as each stripe is written, recovery information is written to the disks – so that if any one of the three disks is lost, the data on it remains available (at only slightly slower speeds) and can be restored automatically when the damaged drive is replaced. Hot-swap systems make this an easy process, and allow the IT SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA to replace the drive without so much as a second of overall downtime.

There are, of course, still some risks. If a second drive fails before the first failed disk is rebuilt, data will be lost and need restoration from backup – creating the same need for downtime. An added level of security can be provided with RAID 6, which tolerates the loss of any two drives before rebuild is complete, and requires only one additional disk to provide the same capacity as a RAID 5 system: a minimum of four drives, providing the storage of two fewer drives than the array contains.

When the permanent availability of your data is critical to your business, and even an hour of server downtime is too much, using a RAID system on your servers can make a huge difference in your network’s fault tolerance… and improves data transfer significantly, for better overall network performance.

PHILLIP SINGLETARY is a provider of professional COMPUTER SUPPORT IN GONZALES LA. If you need IT SUPPORT IN LOUISIANA  for your small business, please contact us at SUPPORT@LATECHNOLOGYSOLUTIONS.COM

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