Re: [cobalt-users] I am getting ready to purchase a RAQ3i (Reliable)??

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 4/20/00 1:29 PM, Nat Chicoria at nat.c@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I was actually thinking of purchasing a warranty from cobalt... Is this not
> worth it??

Well I guess that is fine, but I have no direct experience with their
warranty people.

But I would highly suggest trying to buy from a VAR that has a staff of
knowledgeable Linux systems engineers and can support the cobalt gear.

And regarding your hard drive question: they are standard IDE drives, but
the thing is that if it fails, you've got to :
a) realize it failed
b) go to the server and confirm it has failed
c) find a replacement
d) install replacement
e) install base software from restore cd
f) restore backup

That will take you down for a day, easy, especially if you are co-locating
your server in a remote location.

Having online failover drive means this:
a) you are notified when the drive fails
b) at your leisure, locate a new drive
c) hot swap the failed drive for the new drive
0 downtime, you don't waste an entire day and have the headache of restoring
from tape or coabalts backup system (which leaves a little to be desired).

The way I can justify getting a RAID system is this
The server goes down, we loose goodwill bigtime with the clients, as all of
their e-commerce stops dead while I fumble around to restore the system.
That costs money--how much depends on your clientele.  Professionally, it is
severely damaging to have a server down for an extended period of time.

Figure it takes me an 8 hour day to completely restore a system (which is
actually probably a lower number than you might think). 8 * $125 +
frustration >= $1000.  There is the price of your extra hot-swap drive and
then some.

-k