@Dashrender said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@PhlipElder said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@PhlipElder said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

Picked up Timothy Zahn's new Thrawn Alliances book so am re-reading its predecessor then the new one.

He is a fantastic writer. Great book(s).

There is a new one in the series? I just found my copies of the old trilogy a few days ago.

Yeah, Disney's new canon versus what is now called the "Legends" series or old canon originally doctored by Lucas himself.

The new canon covers the movies, TV series, other online series, and any of the new books published since "The Force Awakens".

In a way, it's a good thing and in a way the decision was a bad thing.

It was good because Disney was not locked in to retelling what was already written in the plethora of Legends books and series. It was bad for much the same reason. So much was left behind.

Another good that came out of it is Zahn's ability to write using his hindsight and augmenting things. The first book was and is amazing. I'm already 3/4 of the way through it. I expect no less from the new "Thrawn Alliances" book.

I'm halfway through the new book... I'd say neither of these live up to the memory I have of the original Zahn triology. They are good, but definitely not as good. As a matter of point - I started reading Alliances 4 weeks ago, and haven't gone back to it.

I haven't really thought of it that way.

I've read the Legends Thrawn Trilogy at least two or three times. They are one of my favourite set short of some of the Han Solo sets, the Millennium Falcon stories, the ongoing tension and eventual marriage of Luke Skywalker to Mara Jade, and many of the other series sets.

I get a sense that much of what Zahn wrote in the Trilogy is there in the new book. There are plenty of references to key bits and pieces. What I'm enjoying is the delving into the Empire's court politics and Thrawn's ice breaker smashing through it for lack of a better analogy.

I especially like the first person bits throughout the book. It's neat. We get a pretty good idea of what is going on with Thrawn as he moves about his various challenges. Eli is a good offset character too. They work well together.

All in all, the original trilogy still stands as one of my favourites right up there with Asimov's Foundation Series. The current one, and it's left to be seen about Alliances, would fall somewhere in the top 25 maybe.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@PhlipElder said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

Picked up Timothy Zahn's new Thrawn Alliances book so am re-reading its predecessor then the new one.

He is a fantastic writer. Great book(s).

There is a new one in the series? I just found my copies of the old trilogy a few days ago.

Yeah, Disney's new canon versus what is now called the "Legends" series or old canon originally doctored by Lucas himself.

The new canon covers the movies, TV series, other online series, and any of the new books published since "The Force Awakens".

In a way, it's a good thing and in a way the decision was a bad thing.

It was good because Disney was not locked in to retelling what was already written in the plethora of Legends books and series. It was bad for much the same reason. So much was left behind.

Another good that came out of it is Zahn's ability to write using his hindsight and augmenting things. The first book was and is amazing. I'm already 3/4 of the way through it. I expect no less from the new "Thrawn Alliances" book.

Picked up Timothy Zahn's new Thrawn Alliances book so am re-reading its predecessor then the new one.

He is a fantastic writer. Great book(s).

@travisdh1 said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

The RAID 10 failure was icing on the cake. Not an emotional reaction, just one that falls into what we've experienced failure wise across the board.

What math did you use to make a single, very unusual RAID 10 failure lead you to something riskier?

How can it be non-emotional unless your discovery was that data loss simply didn't affect you and increasing risk was okay to save money on needing fewer disks?

The statistics for double disk failures. The rebuild rates throw an extra amount of stress on the RAID 10's buddy. That places an extra amount of risk on the table.

Yet we know that RAID 5/6 rebuild adds stress to every drive in the array instead of just a single drive.

Concur, but the stress is a lot more distributed.

@FATeknollogee said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

(BUE failed us so we moved to Storagecraft ShadowProtect which has been flawless to date).

What is BUE?

Sorry, I should have broken the acronym out. It's Backup Exec at one time by Colorado when it was an awesome product then Symantec when things went downhill from there.

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

The RAID 10 failure was icing on the cake. Not an emotional reaction, just one that falls into what we've experienced failure wise across the board.

What math did you use to make a single, very unusual RAID 10 failure lead you to something riskier?

How can it be non-emotional unless your discovery was that data loss simply didn't affect you and increasing risk was okay to save money on needing fewer disks?

The statistics for double disk failures. The rebuild rates throw an extra amount of stress on the RAID 10's buddy. That places an extra amount of risk on the table. The number of times the same thing happened in a RAID 1 setting was also a factor.

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

Parallel rebuild into free pool space rebuilds that dead disk across all members in the pool. So, 2TB gets done in minutes instead of hours/days. Plus, once that dead drive's contents is rebuilt into free pool space so long as there is more free pool space to be had (size of disk + ~150GB) another disk failure can happen and still maintain the two disk resilience (Dual Parity or 3-Way Mirror).

RAID can't do that for us.

Absolutely, this is a huge reason why RAIN has been replacing RAID for a long time. We've had that for many years. Large capacity is making RAID simply ineffective, no surprises there. "Shuffling" data around as needed is a powerful tool.

Technically, RAID can do this, but does it very poorly. It's a feature of hybrid RAID.

We're seeing the same thing in Solid-State now too. As SSD vendors deliver larger and larger capacity devices the write speeds all of a sudden become a limiting factor. Go figure. :S

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

With lots of double disk failures, the real thing you need to be looking at is the disks that you have or the environment that they are in. RAID 5 carries huge risk, but it shouldn't primarily be from double disk failures. That that is what led you away from RAID 5 should have been a red flag that something else was wrong. Double disk failure can happen to anyone, of course, but lots of them indicates a trend that isn't RAID related.

One was environment. The site had the HVAC above the ceiling tiles all messed up with primary paths not capped. So, air return did not work and A/C in the summer stayed above the ceiling tiles and heat in the winter as well. The server closet during the winter could easily hit 40C. There were no more circuits available anywhere in the leased space so we couldn't even get a portable A/C in there.

We experienced four, count them, four catastrophic failures at that site. The owners knew why but we were helpless against it. So, we build-out a highly available system using two servers, third party products, and a really good backup set (BUE failed us so we moved to Storagecraft ShadowProtect which has been flawless to date).

There's statistics. Then there's d*mned statistics.

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

Some examples of things we have math to tell us are good or bad...

RAID 10 .... we've done massive empirical studies. We know that the RAID systems themselves are insanely reliable.
Cheap SAN like the P2000 .... we know that by collecting anecdotes, and knowing total sales figures, that the failure rates of those observed alone is too high for the entire existing set of products made, and we can safely assume that the number we have not observed is vastly higher. But observation alone tells us that the reliability is not high enough for any production use.

We lost an entire virtualization platform and had to recover from scratch because the second member of a RAID 10 pair failed after replacing the first and a rebuild initiating. We'll stick with RAID 6 thanks.

EDIT: The on-site IT and I were well into our coffee chat when the spontaneous beep/beep happened and we were both, WTF?

See, that's an irrational, emotional reaction that we are trying to avoid. You have one anecdote that tells you nothing, but you make a decision based on it that goes against math and empirical studies. Why?

The fact that you and possibly your org has actually studied things is important to the discussion.

I've published about it and speak about it all the time. The study was massive. And took forever. As you can imagine.

One of the reasons we adopted Storage Spaces as a platform was because of the auto-retire and rebuild into free pool space via parallel rebuild. With, at that time, 2TB and larger drives becoming all the more common rebuild times on the RAID controller were taking a long time to happen.

Parallel rebuild into free pool space rebuilds that dead disk across all members in the pool. So, 2TB gets done in minutes instead of hours/days. Plus, once that dead drive's contents is rebuilt into free pool space so long as there is more free pool space to be had (size of disk + ~150GB) another disk failure can happen and still maintain the two disk resilience (Dual Parity or 3-Way Mirror).

RAID can't do that for us.

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

Some examples of things we have math to tell us are good or bad...

RAID 10 .... we've done massive empirical studies. We know that the RAID systems themselves are insanely reliable.
Cheap SAN like the P2000 .... we know that by collecting anecdotes, and knowing total sales figures, that the failure rates of those observed alone is too high for the entire existing set of products made, and we can safely assume that the number we have not observed is vastly higher. But observation alone tells us that the reliability is not high enough for any production use.

We lost an entire virtualization platform and had to recover from scratch because the second member of a RAID 10 pair failed after replacing the first and a rebuild initiating. We'll stick with RAID 6 thanks.

EDIT: The on-site IT and I were well into our coffee chat when the spontaneous beep/beep happened and we were both, WTF?

See, that's an irrational, emotional reaction that we are trying to avoid. You have one anecdote that tells you nothing, but you make a decision based on it that goes against math and empirical studies. Why?

The fact that you and possibly your org has actually studied things is important to the discussion.

We've had enough double disk failures over time to have influenced the decision to drop RAID 5. The RAID 10 failure was icing on the cake. Not an emotional reaction, just one that falls into what we've experienced failure wise across the board.