My company is buying a couple servers. I don't have a sysadmin background and neither does anyone at my company but I'm the "computer guy" so it falls to me to spec them out.
We were given the option of putting RAID on our servers but I declined since we already have RAID backups going at our office. My boss didn't understand why I declined the RAID and, honestly, neither do I.
My thinking is that if a server's hard drive fails, we can restore it from backup (to a different, clean server) and it wouldn't be a huge deal (we'd practice these recoveries, of course).
My boss's thinking (as I understand it) is that having RAID on our servers would mean no downtime (or at least significantly less downtime) because if the primary disk fails, the server can just switch to one of the other disks without missing a beat.
It's important to note that this server will be very low-traffic. In fact, it won't even be connected to the internet (except possibly to grab OS updates). It will mostly just be running automated jobs.
Since neither myself not my boss know a whole lot about this "RAID-on-a-server" idea, can someone shed some light on this for us? And to clarify, this isn't a me-vs-my-boss situation. We're just trying to find the right solution together.