Newbie Upgrading Server Space

[04amh]

Hi all,

 

 

I'm relatively new (a year or two) to the server game, as previously we paid an external company to manage them, but that proved expensive and the head shifted it onto me. I am a technician by trade.

 

I'd like to upgrade the amount of space we have in our server, as we currently have around 600GB, which for a three-form school is crazy. I'm constantly archiving stuff...

 

If I'm honest, I don't really know where to start! I would start with a backup, however how would I increase the storage in RAID? I'm guessing that I cannot just pop in a larger hard drive and let RAID do it's thing.

 

Any ideas?

[mavhc]

Depends on the raid really, what's your current setup, what servers, how many drive slots, how many are in use, what disks, what raid card, how is the raid setup?

[KevinB]

As @mavhc says, the specifics of your approach will be hardware dependant but in principle the following methodology usually works with no downtime but does take a while as RAID arrays are rebuilt. It assumes you're using a RAID scheme that supports losing at least one disk with no data loss (e.g. RAID5 or RAID6) and that your array is set to auto-rebuild in case of a replaced drive.

 

Take a backup.

Check the integrity of your backup.

Take another backup.

Check the integrity of that backup too.

Did I mention taking a backup?

Swap one drive and allow the array to rebuild, monitor with whatever RAID tools you have on the server to be sure the array is rebuilt.

Once the array is back in sync, swap the next drive.

Repeat until all of your drives are swapped.

Enter your RAID software and grow the virtual disk to use the newly available space.

Enter your OS disk management software and rescan the disk.

Grow the volume to use the newly found space.

 

I've done this a number of times on Dell Poweredge servers that we use as VEEAM backup repositories with no issues.

[DanTheLacky]

I did as @KevinB said year or two ago with no issues

[A_IT_M]

I need to give this a try!!

[Davit2005]

I need to give this a try!!

 

From personal experience I cannot highlight the need to take a backup enough and test it.

 

This was about 10 years ago, we were lucky in the fact that we had just recently fixed all the backup issues that we inherited. 7pm we found out the data had gone, It was a non-school day the following day but we had everything restored by midday.

 

In actual fact re-building the DC sorted out another major issue we'd inherited

Edited June 18, 2020 by Davit2005

[DrBeaker]

Maybe during this start to allocate storage quotas for staff/departments and say they need to justify to the Head etc why they need more space.

 

It's not just ££'s for storage it's also ££'s for backup or archival.

[Primus]

Maybe during this start to allocate storage quotas for staff/departments and say they need to justify to the Head etc why they need more space.

 

It's not just ££'s for storage it's also ££'s for backup or archival.

 

This - with your backup/archive you will end up storing the data many times over - eg. we do a backup every day, synthetic every week and keep these all on disk for a month then archive onto tape and keep for 13 months plus an offsite backup onto a NAS at another site.