James Matthews wrote:
I am looking to mount it and as a webserver/database server. So you are recommending NFS?
NFS only handles the network side of things, you can't format a disk/LUN with "NFS" as the file system. So you need a file system on the server.
It sounds like your needs are very simple, and you can just go with ext3 on the server and mount using NFS on the client.
Latency will be normal, not lowest, not low, but normal.
Test it out, see if it works for you.
I would not use NFS for a database myself, unless it was really lightly loaded, just a personal preference though.
You don't mention what the web server will be doing or what kind of database, what kind of throughput or IOPS your looking for etc.
You can see how a basic RHEL 5.1 system (not tuned) compares to some of the purpose built systems out there on the SPEC SFS benchmark: http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/sfs2008nfs.html
The NFS setup we have is backed by 200 disks, 56GB of mirrored cache on a set of active-active controllers. Performance is quite good, though it's not designed for lowest latency, we're using SATA-II disks instead of 10 or 15k RPM disks. It more than suits our needs though.
nate