Planning for Fault-Tolerant Disks

Disk failure can result in the irrecoverable loss of essential data, and will cause the load balancing service to stop functioning, along with the server and all of its other applications. For this reason, consider using special methods to protect your disks from failure.

Many resource groups include disk resources on shared buses. In some cases, these are simple physical disks, but in other cases they are complex disk subsystems containing multiple disks. Almost all resource groups depend on the disks on the shared buses. An unrecoverable failure of a disk resource results in certain failure of the group that contains that resource. For these reasons, you might decide to use specific methods to protect your disks and disk subsystems from failures.

One common solution is to use a hardware-based RAID solution. RAID support ensures high availability of the data contained on the disk sets in your clusters. Some of these hardware-based solutions are considered fault-tolerant, which means that you do not lose data if a member of the disk set fails.

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