[Scottish] RAID Setup[Scanned]

[Colin McKinnon]

On Wednesday 09 April 2008 10:58, Phillip Bennett wrote:
> Tim,
>
> The point of the ATA over Ethernet was to allow more than one machine to
> access the storage at a time and without the hassle of NFS or samba.
>

erm, OK. Are you suggesting that a region of disk be shared because that's a 
real can of worms - you'd have to roll your own fencing solution - not 
impossible - GFS comes with a bare bones solution which could be adapted. 

One thing which hasn't been mentioned yet in the thread and which you really 
want to decide on BEFORE you go shopping for parts and working out how to 
connect them is what this box will be doing - typically RAID1 is a far better 
soltuion for OLTP than RAID5. It might also be advisable to offer tiers of 
availability and performance (and you could something really lever with 
overlays to make them appear as a single filesystem). But pushing the RAID 
control across the network is a recipe for disaster and certainly would not 
give a performance benefit compared with a server based filesystem exported 
across the network.

> I don't want to use SCSI because it's direct connect and can't be used on
> more than one machine at a time.  

erk - alarm bells ringing. I think your confusing the low level access 
protocol with the file system - both iSCSI and AoE would require a clusterfs 
to provide shared access.

C.