[CentOS] HA Storage Cookbook?

[Flaherty, Patrick]

> >>> Hello List,
> >>>
> >>> Can anyone recommend some sites regarding building 
> high-availability
> >>> storage networks using centos (or the upstream providers 
> brand name)?
> >>> I need to have approx 2-3 tb of storage available via 
> iscsi and smb,
> >>> but worry about having it all on a single server.  Most of the HA
> >>> articles I'm reading deal with application high 
> availability, but not
> >>> storage.
> >>>       
> >> Check out openfiler?
> >>
> >> http://www.openfiler.com/products
> >>
> >> For me I would just buy a real storage array, better reliability
> >> generally. Though entry level pricing is around $20k.
> >
> > In some countries those storage arrays are about 3 more 
> expensive, so
> > it's cheaper to build it yourself with PC / server components. I'm
> > actually interested in such a setup as well, and would like 
> to cluster
> > 2x machines to give a network RAID setup. What would you recommend
> > using? The idea is to serve to servers which will be clustered as
> > well, hosting web hosting Virtual Private Servers.
> >
> 
> You could use DRBD, if you trust it.
> AFAIK, Parallels more-or-less supports this.
> http://wiki.openvz.org/HA_cluster_with_DRBD_and_Heartbeat

I use drbd for database HA for over a year and have never seen any
problems. I'm fairly confident it's ability. I know this is a CentOS
mailing list, but a couple pizza boxes and a sas shelf that allows 2+
connections using open solaris+zfs may be your cheapest bet (if you
trust a single sas box). ZFS lets you export the volumes as iscsi, nfs,
and cifs. You can also use their storagetek suite to replicate over two
boxes with independent storage.

Patrick