In a lot of environments.

Peter gives a nice overview why you don't always need to invest in big fat redundant hardware.

We've tackled the topic last year already ..

Now I often get weird looks when I dare to mention that Raid is obsolete ..people fail to hear the "in a lot of environments"

Obviously the catch is in the second part, you won't be doing this for your small shop around the corner with just one machine. You'll only be doing this in an environment where you can work with a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Not with a server that has to sit in a remote and isolated location.

Next to that there are situations where you will be using raid, but not for redundancy, but for disk throughput.

I've been doing some benchmarking recently to satisfy the curiosity about 5.1's performance compared with 4.1.  The major question this time revolves around how much additional performance an external RAID array can provide (for us it's typically beyond the 6 drives a Dell 2950 can hold). 

These tests are done on using an MSA-30 drive enclosure with 15k-SCSI drives.  The testing framework is sysbench oltp.  The test names are hopefully fairly obvious:  selects = single selects, reads = range tests, xacts = transaction tests, etc.   Transaction tests are counting individual queries, not transactions.   The "Rdm" tests are using a uniform distribution, whereas the non-'Rdm' tests are 75% of queries are using 10% of the rows.  

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I've been doing some benchmarking recently to satisfy the curiosity about 5.1's performance compared with 4.1.  The major question this time revolves around how much additional performance an external RAID array can provide (for us it's typically beyond the 6 drives a Dell 2950 can hold). 

These tests are done on using an MSA-30 drive enclosure with 15k-SCSI drives.  The testing framework is sysbench oltp.  The test names are hopefully fairly obvious:  selects = single selects, reads = range tests, xacts = transaction tests, etc.   Transaction tests are counting individual queries, not transactions.   The "Rdm" tests are using a uniform distribution, whereas the non-'Rdm' tests are 75% of queries are using 10% of the rows.  

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