I just love RAID and hot-swap drives

One of the drives on our Exchange Server went bad over the weekend. Luckily I had a spare on hand and was able to get the array rebuilt right away. That’s the good thing about RAID. You can lose a drive and still keep running. That’s also the good thing about hot swap drives. You can replace one with the power on and nobody notices the server came that close to suffering a catastrophic meltdown. I just hope I can still get a replacement for the old 36GB hot swap drive so I can have a spare on hand.

I would never run a major server like an Exchange server or a SQL server without RAID and hot-swap drives. We also run redundant and hot-swap power supplies and fans on those critical servers. We exclusively use HP Proliant servers and have been for many years. Yes, it costs a little bit more than your no-name clone but I'm not about to trust our critical email and accounting systems to anything less reliable. I suppose if I worked in a larger shop I would find Dells but in every small business I worked at for the past twelve years, we've used HP servers.