[Platforms #BUD-433591]: hard drive problems

["Unidata Platforms Support" <support-platforms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mark,

> Hi!  Yesterday we experience what appears to have been a possibly severe
> hard drive problem on foehn.colorado.edu, the University of Colorado
> server for the Antarctic-IDD.  It is also currently configured to
> retrieve WMO and IDS|DDPLUS.

A quick comment here.  The IDD feedtype 'WMO' is actually a compound
feed composed of the combination of IDS|DDPLUS and HDS.  So, if you
have ~ldm/etc/ldmd.conf request lines for both WMO and IDS|DDPLUS,
you are requesting the IDS|DDPLUS data twice.

> Having it down for the entire day, made us
> realize that we would prefer foehn to not have long down times, and we
> are considering some new hardware/hard drive configurations to build
> stability.

Sounds good.

> Currently we have a single 400 GB SATA drive.  This has provided ample
> space allowing us to maintain the regular data streams and copy some
> events over for short term archiving.
> 
> -Have SATA drives provided any problems considering the heavy data
> transfer/usage involved with the LDM?

We do not have much if any experience with the newer SATA hard drives
on machines running the LDM.  Our high availability machines have always
been purchased with SCSI hard drives.  The cost is, of course, higher, but
our experience with SCSI drives in Unix systems has been very positive.

> -Do you have any other recommendations to provide stability to the system?

If you are looking for very high availability, you would do well to consider
purchasing machines that have redundant power supplies and RAID so that
critical file systems are mirrored.  All Unidata-maintained IDD relay nodes
have SCSI-based mirrored (RAID5) disk subsystems.

> Thanks

No worries.

> P.S.  One of the items which was most missed yesterday was access to the
> web pages for new University of Colorado weather stations in the area.
> In case you are interested in more local weather data, we have simple
> Davis stations on campus, in Lafayette, and San Luis Valley.
> http://foehn.colorado.edu/weather/

Thanks for letting us know about this site!  This kind of data is very interesting
during "interesting" weather events like we experienced in the past several
days :-)

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: BUD-433591
Department: Support Platforms
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed