Thanks RAID!

This is a transcript of what happens when—as did this morning—one of our server hard drives fail:

• 06:21 PST—Rackspace datacenter engineer: “Your server was alerting for a failed hard drive (ID0:0:2). We have replaced the failed drive and your server’s RAID array is currently being rebuilt while remaining online.”
• 07:13 PST—Rackspace engineer: “The rebuild is sitting at 39% at the moment.”
• 07:46 PST—Rackspace engineer: “The rebuild is sitting at 63% at the moment.”
• 08:36 PST—Rackspace engineer: “The RAID rebuild has completed and the disks are again fully protected.”

RAID 5 is one of the server features which keep our servers humming right through the inevitable hardware fault. And it keeps us humming through breakfast while Rackspace’s gnomes attend to the dirty.