on 11-7-2008 7:18 AM Gordon McLellan spake the following:
So the short answers are:
- 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.
-Gordon
Who is your hardware vendor if you don't mind me asking? That is a very good deal on the storage.