Planning for redundancy

Redundancy means having a spare, but a spare for what? Everything. Every single part, from the motherboard to the chassis, power supply to network cable, disk space to throughput, should have at least one piece of excess equipment or capacity available for immediate use.

The intent of this recipe is to consider as many of these elements as we can imagine before committing to a final inventory purchase.

Getting ready

Fire up your favorite spreadsheet program; we'll be using it to keep track of all the parts that go into the server, and any capacity concerns. If you don't have one, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are good free alternatives for building these spreadsheets, as is Google Sheets. The...