Raid 1 my ass.

The is sorta a technical post, but at the end of the day - its about doing your job.

My job, as an IT person, is to provide quality service to my end users in a timely manner while keeping downtime to a minimum. To do this - I rely pretty heavily on technology and help from the Gods or RAID. Raid is an acronym that has a couple definitions but they all pretty much mean: Redundant Array of Independent Disks. In my situation - I use RAID 1, often called a mirror. It has a lot of overhead, but should give you the most protection.

I say should because as I waited for my work mail server to respond to a request (I'll cut to the chase, it went unanswered), I was wondering if the RAID had failed. In a perfect world - a single drive would fail and the other MIRRORED drive would pick up the slack. I would then casually come into the office on Monday and swap out the bad drive and the RAID would rebuild itself.

Sadly - it didn't work that way so I'm currently rebuilding a mail server with a new single drive (that I will clone weekly) and restoring from a backup (that runs nightly). Its a hassle and will probably eat up about four hours of my Sunday - though this is preferable to having an outage in the middle of a work day.

Before all of this went down, I was able to have a really nice morning with my super extended family including my mom/dad, Kristin's mom/dad, Eli/Maris and Kristin.

Well, better get back to my restore...looks like the status bar started moving again.