A Long Weekend

This weekend was one long weekend. I don’t mean one of those “economic holidays” that the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo like to declare. No, this one is long for another reason.

The company has been running out of disk storage and it’s about time for a major upgrade. The old capacity was 1.4TB of RAID 5 goodness and we plan to add another 1.4TB. This should suffice for a few months till we can get one of those entry-level NAS appliances which come in capacities like 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. We also planned to take the opportunity to do systems administration training at the same time.

Playing around with storage is never easy. You have to take into consideration the fact that users access it in real time. And of course, there’s the fact that data and information are the most important assets of a company nowadays. This means, if we are to do anything, it has to be done when there are no users. This is only during the weekend. And late Saturday night at that. Also, we will have to be very careful.

We started at around 2PM by removing the old new RAID box from the rack at its storage area. It should have been removed beforehand and in fact that was the plan. But it was never done. It took an hour or so of mechanical work before we were able to wrench the RAID box off. We then carted it over to IT where we configured the RAID array, installed Linux FC6 on the operating system drive, and then started formatting the newly configured RAID drive. Formatting a 1.4TB RAID 5 drive takes time so we started on some training sessions and had dinner while waiting.

At around 9PM formatting was finally completed. By then, all the users have gone home so we shut down the servers and installed the new RAID box in the server rack along with the old RAID box. We then copied the files from the old RAID box to the new RAID box. This is when we hit a speed bump.

We tried various methods of copying: network, external USB drive, and finally drive-to-drive. They were all slow. We have gone through remaining training sessions and had breakfast but by Sunday noon the copying was still not done. We finally decided to leave the servers copying files overnight.

So, yeah, theoretically the long weekend is not over yet.