Hello everybody I have gotten myself into a bit of a pickle. I have a hp dl360e g8 running openwrt(The reason for this is because it has pcie slots and i have 2 4 port 10g nics). The server runs on a single crappy sd card with no storage redundancy. I use this router in a semi production environment and cant have more than an hour of downtime per month. This router has been the bottleneck for growing my environment everything in my server lab is redundant from switches to storage except on the router. I would like to make the router run on reudundant storage. The dl360e g8 uses a b120i which is basically just an hba controller with hp software drivers and oviously i assume its not compatible with openwrt. Does anyone have any ideas on how i could setup reudundant storage in my current situation and how i can migrate my openwrt instance to the new storage.
Yikes--that does sound like a bit of a pickle, indeed. 
Been a while since I've worked with HP servers, but if I remember correctly the 'B' series controllers are kind of "entry level" (no offense) and are not hardware RAID capable (which you already called out).
Just to confirm, your riser cage has only two PCIe slots, yes? Assuming that is the case, having both consumed with your 10gb NICs does not allow you to add in a true hardware RAID card (HP Smart Array P420/1GB FBWC Controller). Obviously being able to run a true RAID1 on a hardware controller would be your best possible scenario.
Would you be willing to boot from USB? Especially given the internal USB port available?
i can boot through usb but i was unable to find any redundant usbs under like 300 dollars. is there anyway to do somesort of software raid.
What about tackling the question from a slightly different angle?
OpenWrt itself doesn't really have lots of "data" that could be lost, 'just' its configuration (which you should back up) and there are plenty of other components that could go bad just as well as the main storage. Why don't you put a second -identically configured- router next to the HP, that may not even need to be x86 (although there are plenty skylake/ kabylake SFF systems on the used markets for little money), if you don't need full performance in case of failure. If you configure that as cold-standby (power-on and change two cables around) or as HA setup is a matter of personal preference, respectively of how high your demands are.
If availability is a concern to you, you may want to replace the USB with a small SSD from a reputable vendor as well, that alone reduces the likelyness of failure compared to a USB stick or SDHC card as well.
madm not work for you ?
HPE (used to) sell a USB stick with two uSD card slots in it, in RAID1, I belive.
irrelevant in this case, but the 8GB uSD cards that came with it were blazing fast too.
it's ~100$ on eBay, still expensive, but at least not $300.
google P21868-B21.
is there anyway to convert the current os which is ext4 to openwrt that runs in ram after boot?
I don't immediately have an answer for that. But I'm curious what you would be aiming to accomplish with that. Could you elaborate?
You can pull the boot media once it started ?
Fair point, but if the OP is trying to gain storage redundancy, I'm just curious what pulling the boot media would resolve.
yes if my understanding is correct on the ext4 openwrt runs on the sd and if it fails openwrt shuts down. And if my understanding of squash fs is correct it uses the sd to boot but after that it runs in ram. My dl360e has reudundant power supplies running on 2 diffrent ups's so the odds of it rebooting are very low. I am going back to university tommorow and dont have any good spare ssds on hand so i am now unable to switch to redundant storage before i leave. So i want to change the server to run in ram if possible as a sort of band aid solution. The server as it stands has 2 1 tb seagate sata drives running in it(unused but detected by openwrt) and 1 32gb sd card(the health of which is unknown).