Am 08.07.2013 23:42, schrieb Alan McKinnon: > If it makes you feel better, then by all means go through the motions > . > > For my money, I reckon that's exactly what it is - motions and ritual. I > havew any anecdotal evidence to back it up, but it's fairly strong > anecdotal evidence: > > Over the last 5 years, the team I'm in, the teams we work closely with > and the Storage guys have commissioned >1000 pieces of hardware and > probably more than 4000 drives, the vast majority from Dell. I have no > idea what burn-in Dell applies, if any. We've had our fair share of > infant mortality failures, prob ably less than 20 in 5 years. And here's > the kicker - every single one failed in production. > > Most of that hardware, and ALL of the SANs, went through heavy > pre-deployment testing. Usually, this means cloning the -dev system onto > it and running the crap out of it for a decent length of time. Once the > techies were happy, install the production version and switch it on. > > I conclude that the likely reason we only found failure in prod is that > only prod gives a decent viable test that approximates real life and dev > is always a mere simulation. It's not usage that kills a few drives > early, it's the almost random pattern of disk access that you get in > real life. That tends to shake out the weak links better than any test. > > However, this is all anecdotal so use or discard as you see fit :-). I > no longer worry about data loss as we have 4 hour warranty turnaround > SLAs in place and company policy is to only deploy storage that is > guaranteed to survive loss of any one drive in an array.
Thanks for that, good point :-) Stefan
