[CentOS] HA Storage Cookbook?

Rainer Duffner rainer at ultra-secure.de
Fri Nov 7 15:36:57 UTC 2008


Gordon McLellan schrieb:
> So the short answers are:
>
> 1) centos/redhat possess no built-in means of block-level replication
> via GFS / RHCS
> 2) openfiler provides some manor of block-level replication
> 3) there's "beta" software out there that can do it, but it might not
> be a good idea for production (drbd)
>
> Just for reference; my hardware vendor can set me up with a Supermicro
> Superserver with 8tb of SAS disk space on hardware raid, 8g of ram and
> a 5410 quad core cpu for about $4500.  From Dell, I can buy an empty
> SAN box for about $5000, and then pay $500 ea for 1tb sas disks that I
> can buy retail for about $200.  The Dell solution provides no
> replication either.  The only thing I see Dell providing in this case
> is a brand name and an on-site warranty.  Given the most likely item
> to fail in a storage server is going to be the storage, I don't see
> the on-site warranty being a big bonus, since they still have to ship
> you a new drive.
>
>   

If you have a "real" SAN (HP EVA), you can buy block-level
replication-software for that.
But the software is not exactly cheap (six-figure-sum budget expected).
What does downtime cost for you?

With a SAN, you also need switches and HBAs - and everything redundant....

I'd look into ZFS+StorageTek Availability-Suite - or, as sugggested,
scrap the idea entirely and instead go for reliable hardware+onsite
spares + a fast backup (which also means fast restore, usually). If your
tape-backup does 80MB/s and you have 3 TB of data, you need about half a
day to do a full-restore...


cheers,
Rainer



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