[ale] Topic ideas for November meeting

[Lightner, Jeff]

In general I was talking about internal drives.   Many of our servers come in with more than we need for the OS and some applications which is usually all we really want on the internal drives.

Attached disk storage is done (mostly) on requested need.   

There was a recent discussion about turning on oversubscription capabilities of our disk array but I suggested strongly this was a bad idea.   "They" have a tendency to "use" all storage allocated to a server to "save" information that somehow they can never get rid of when filesystems fill up unless they have to buy more space at which point they can they can magically do without it.   We'd end up filling the disk array in a hurry if we allowed oversubscription in my view because no one would ever feel the need to delete anything and we'd then get into arguments about what "saved" data is most important.

Sometimes technology introduces rather than solves problems.



-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of DJ-Pfulio
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2015 10:41 AM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Topic ideas for November meeting

On 11/03/2015 08:20 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Funny.  Here we did that and were accused of "hiding disk space".
> They couldn't see why you'd want to keep space in reserve until needed 
> even though they were specifically asking for a new filesystem that we 
> couldn't have built if we hadn't done it the way we did it.

How much did their project purchase?  As administrators we know $200 buys a 750G SAS disk, but not:
* installation + cables
* configuration
* backups (daily, weekly, monthly, annual, "fulls")
* offsite storage costs
* DR storage
* WAN to push all that data
* RAID ports (if any)
* replacement backup tapes
* shipping
* warranty

I recall a non-trivial tape drive and tape media estimation spreadsheet and buying hundreds of tapes and 5 LTO drives for a relatively small amount of storage. Why 5 drives? Backups had to finish in the allowed time. Also had to buy new switches for the backup network  because we'd already used all  the available sw-ports.

If "withholding storage" is what the end users want to call it, fine.
Have them provide the budget to provide those things for the additional storage to be brought online.  A quick guess is $8K.  Truly a guess, don't quote me.

Personally, if I cannot backup the storage properly, I don't want it available. PERIOD.  Users will always say that area will only be for scratch stuff, but a month later it has critical files.  A month after that, when a disk crashes and all that data is gone, it doesn't matter who signed the non-backup risk-acceptance paperwork. It is still our fault.


> -----Original Message----- From: ale-bounces at ale.org 
> [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Phil Turmel Sent: Monday, 
> November 02, 2015 7:17 PM To: ale at ale.org Subject: Re: [ale] Topic 
> ideas for November meeting
> 
> +100!
> 
> I also always leave the bulk of the PVs unallocated until I know the 
> usage pattern.  And even then I leave some for emergency resizing.
> 
> On 11/02/2015 06:46 PM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
>> My rules on this are simple. a) ALWAYs use LVM on physical systems. 
>> b) NEVER use LVM on VM storage (inside the VM).
>> 
>> In 20+ years,  I've never been able to guess correctly the amount of 
>> storage needed for any specific partition. Being able to resize LVs 
>> without rebooting is FANTASTIC! That's just 1 little thing.
>> There are many others. I love that formatting an LV with ext4 is 
>> basically instantaneous, regardless of the amount of storage.
>> 
>> In this I equate LVM == ZFS == BTRFS. Enhanced volume management is  
>> the goal. No need to be tied to some hardware limitation that MBR or 
>> even GPT force onto us.
> 
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