[Linux-cluster] Advice on Storage Hardware

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 15:38 -0500, David Brieck Jr. wrote:
> On 11/11/05, Michael Will <mwill at penguincomputing.com> wrote:
> > I don't see why that should be a problem, thats a common solution we
> > recommend to
> > customers even without GFS, doing just ordinary NFS and using heartbeat,
> > active/passive
> > is uncritical.You can even have two NFS mounts of separate partitions
> > and have an active/active
> > that fails over the missing one if one of the two machines goes down.
> > This means you mount one
> > from one IP address and the other from the other, and the IP address
> > gets migrated over.
> >
> > This can even be done with SCSI attached storage (4TB per enclosure, up
> > to two connected to
> > a 1U server), but of course the fibre attached storage (direct attached
> > as well as a complete san)
> > is considered more reliable and performant.
> >
> > Michael Will
> 
> Thanks Michael. We had a call with our hardware vendor and spoke about
> the SAN solution after which they sent us a working estimate of costs
> for a 7 server cluster. If we are able to use the aforementioned
> storage solution in place of a fibre SAN we stand to save a
> significant amount of money for an application that our IT department
> just doesn't think it's necessary.
> 
> We've got another call with them next week where they are going to try
> to convince us that we're wrong and need to buy the SAN, I just want
> to make sure I don't look like an idiot when they get one of their
> engineers on the call and explain where I'm wrong and I'm not able to
> defend myself.

AC/NC's JetStor dual-SCSI stuff works for us under GFS.  We also have
a couple of large SANs (each about 26TB), but the small stuff works on
JetStors.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-         "The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography"         -
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