With hard discs being by far the most common point of failure in servers RAID does wonders for protection against loss of data.

With a RAID array in normal operation we’re in a pretty safe place. We know that we can suffer failure of a drive without loss of data or disruption of service. Once a drive has failed however we’re in a slightly more precarious position. Loss of another drive or damage to the remaining drive could easily cause major problems. At this point the only thing that can protect you can against data loss if you make a mistake is your backups – you did configure backups didn’t you?

Restoring a damaged RAID array is a task that requires extra caution. 

On our range of dedicated servers and vps‘ it’s one of those things that just happens automatically and the client usually only finds out after the problem has been fixed. For our co-location customers however it’s a task that we often find ourselves involved with to lend a helping hand.

With this in mind we’ve started to put together a series of articles discussing the steps we take to restore a Linux RAID array after hard disc failure and recoving from a Windows software RAID failure We hope you find them useful.

Our new colocation space will be ready to go very soon! In the last couple of days we’ve had the new racks installed and the basic network infrastructure connected. The power rails in each rack will be powered up on Friday, and the network hardware will be installed. We expect to have live equipment in there in less than a week.

This will mostly be a photo post, they speak for themselves. To keep things interesting we’ve got photos of some of the high-level building infrastructure. This is the heavy-duty, redundancy-everywhere stuff that keeps you up and running, guaranteed. If you’re interested, follow the link on each photo; there’s a little more detail on what you’re looking at.

You can see most of the new floorspace and racks in the photos there. Once it’s online, we’ll have doubled our entire operating capacity. I’d say we’re growing rather nicely.

Photos are Creative Commons licensed

Anchor’s colocation requirements have been growing steadily over the past few years, so we’ve recently taken the plunge to significantly increase our total datacentre floor space which will allow for many new racks. At this point we’re in the early stages of fitting out the suite, so we thought it an ideal chance to give our readers some insight into the process of fitting out a data centre.

A long view of the new Anchor suite area

The plan is to produce a new blog post for each step; and, of course, take plenty of pretty pictures along the way!

A handful of our new racks, some still in their wrapping

You can see above a few of the shiny new extra-wide racks that have already been delivered. The keen-eyed might also be able to see the tape marking the locations of the first few racks to be powered up shortly, with the under-floor power installation happening right now. The suite’s cage will be going in real soon now.

A long view from the opposite end of our new suite area

Redundant air-conditioning units

We’ll keep the blog updated as things progress, so check back soon for the next post!