Chapter 3: System Storage Best Practices

Probably the most complicated and least understood components of System Administration involve the area of storage. Storage tends to be poorly covered, rarely taught, and often treated as myth rather than science. Storage also involves the most fear because it is in storage that our mistakes risk losing data, and nothing tends to be a bigger failure than data loss.

Storage decisions impact performance, capacity, longevity, and most importantly, durability. Storage is where we have the smallest margin of error as well as where we can make the biggest impact. In other areas of planning and design we often get the benefit of quite a bit of fudge factor, mistakes are often graceful such as a system that is not quite as fast as it needs to be or is somewhat more costly than necessary, but in storage overbuilding might double total costs and mistakes will quite easily result in non-functional systems. Failure tends to be anything but graceful...