We’ve been looking after servers with RAID for more than 15 years and yet we still see servers that have RAID disk arrays but no RAID admin software installed. This means that you can’t see the state of the array or be alerted to the failure of a disk.

This last point is critical. Imagine if you have a simple Small Business Server with a pair of mirrored drives. This machine may run happily for a number of years but eventually a disk is going to fail. The RAID hardware protects the machine from the disk failure and everything continues as usual. However, now the server is in a dangerous state, if the remaining disk fails the machine is dead.

This is why it’s so important to install the RAID management software on your server. Part of the system will alert you (usually by Email) to the failure of a disk. You can then react to replace the faulty drive and bring the server back into a redundant state.

Without the alert, you are simply putting off the critical failure of your server. In-fact, if you have a multi-disk level  5 RAID array the situation is even worse, if a single disk fails then the failure of any of the other disks will cause the loss of the server.

If you want a Windows server to run as long as ours, 978 days without interruption, then we recommend calling us about a quality HP server. We’ll make sure that the RAID software is installed and working well!

Jason Timmins – Technical Director – Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd – mbmltd.co.uk