[CentOS] HA Storage Cookbook?

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 10:18:02AM -0500, Gordon McLellan wrote:
> 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.

I'm guessing you mean SATA instead of SAS.

I suppose you could perhaps do something with iSCSI or ATAoE to another
similarly configured box and then tie the local corresponding block
device and the ATAoE/iSCSI block device together with RAID1 or LVM...

Don't know how well that'd work vs something drbd with a local, "fast"
device and a remote "slow" device (1Gbps over the network).

Ray