Last night’s main event involved attaching a new drive cabinet to our CommVault backup server to increase its storage capacity.  This machine already had 1.5TB in RAID5 array mounted internally, and it was very close to being full, so we purchased a 12-bay cabinet and filled it with 750GB drives.  I also ended up buying a RocketRaid 2440 controller and some multilane cables to make the connection between the PC and the drive cabinet.

The installation went very smooth except for a minor detail.  The controller for the internal drives (a RocketRaid 1740) was causing me a little bit of grief when I tried to set up the new controller.  I was able to get to the BIOS settings for the 1740, but not the 2240.  I ended up pulling the 1740 out of the case temporarily and this allowed me to get to the BIOS settings for the new 2440 card.  Once the new RAID array was set up on the 2440, I popped the 1740 card back in and both cards worked flawlessly, giving the backup server roughly 9TB of total storage space.

Here’s a shot of the drive cabinet next to our whitebox backup server.  It will get rack-mounted sometime in the next couple of weeks, I just have to get some other equipment moved around in the server rack first.

Once we get a gigabit switch mounted in our #1 IDF, we’ll begin backing up our video content across the network to this server as well.  Once all that content is in 2 places simultaneously, I’ll be breathing a lot easier.