Topic: SME/asterisk resilience

[tag]

Hi guys

I'm playing around with an sme/asterisk server at the moment (I've used a modified version of Dungog's beta front-end) and I'm really impressed.  My only concern about going live with it is downtime.  We can live with the system being down for an hour or two but not the phones.  So I figured that, since the most likely failure will be the spinning stuff, I could load the system onto a big flash memory card and use an IDE converter.  But then what about e-mail and where to store it? -  even the biggest flash cards are only 4Gb.  

Now, I no nuffin' about e-mail, don't know what the storage options are, don't even know where it's stored on the drive.  So... any thoughts/advice insights would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Tag

[psoren]

Hi guys

I'm playing around with an sme/asterisk server at the moment (I've used a modified version of Dungog's beta front-end) and I'm really impressed.  My only concern about going live with it is downtime.  We can live with the system being down for an hour or two but not the phones.  So I figured that, since the most likely failure will be the spinning stuff, I could load the system onto a big flash memory card and use an IDE converter.  But then what about e-mail and where to store it? -  even the biggest flash cards are only 4Gb.  

Now, I no nuffin' about e-mail, don't know what the storage options are, don't even know where it's stored on the drive.  So... any thoughts/advice insights would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Tag

A simple way would be to use software RAID 1.

Per

[RayG]

FLASH memory has a limited number of write cycles before it fails. Your unlikely to ever run into this limitation with a flash memory stick or .mp3 player because you don't write to those devices very often. Between swap space, lock files, and log files, the SME server would be writing to the FLASH based hard drive constantly and would quickly wear it out. LINUX distros intended to run from FLASH usually set up a RAM disk and move these busy files out of the FLASH space. I really like the low power consumption and high reliability of FLASH drives but they are not a great choice for your main server.

Our solution to the downtime issue is to ghost the SME servers drive regularly. Aside from reconfiguring the network cards, that backup drive can be put in just about any similar computer and be up in a matter of minutes.

[hordeusr]

I like the 3ware 8506-4LP.  You could set-up a raid 5 array using 3 drives + a hot spare.  If a drive fails the hot spare will be automatically rebuilt and become part of the array.  Then replace the dead drive with a new drive and make it the hot spare.  No downtime, notification via e-mail of any problems, web-based raid interface.  Works very nice (I'm using 3 250gb western digital 'raid' drives.