[KLUG Members] RE: alternate redundancy v. cost

[Robert V. Kanaley]

Perhaps not as detailed or sophisticated an answer as some of our KLUG
guru's, but . . .

For my money, NAS is getting so cheap, so easy and so feature rich that to
me it makes more and more sense to use Gigabit Ethernet to connect one set
of boxes to run apps with Network Attached Storage to hold the files. To
handle redundancy and availability you can get NAS in ATA/IDE UltraXXX,
SATA, or SCSI in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, or 50, with hot spares and/or auto
failover. Some NAS'es come setup to do NAS to NAS to tape backups that are
pretty much plug and play. Most are tunable to your bandwidth.

Most NAS'es support NSF, FTP, and CIFS/SMB right out of the box. We are
talking plug in NAS, plug in network card, use web interface to add users,
assign groups, and set quota's (if, as I am, you are in a non-domain
environment). If you are in an AD, DC or LDAP environment, a lot of NAS'es
play there very well. The higher end units have redundant hot swap power
supplies, hot swap hard drives, redundant NIC,s, multipath I/O and scale to
petabytes without a reboot.

If redundancy and high availability are important, some of these babies just
rock hard. You can go as simple as you want or as sophisticated as you need.
And, it doesn't take an LPI/KLUG guru to set up any of this.

I have been gathering info on NAS because I am looking at ways I might be
able to implement full bare metal restores for my 66 host LAN.

Once upon a time I wanted to do an inexpensive, redundant, autofailover
server. That was when I found the Linux HA project and heartbeat
http://www.linux-ha.org/. If you really want to do a redundant server, I
would probably go with dual GB NIC's and out of band with heartbeat and
autofailover with IP assumption, etc. The Linux HA project has lots of good
links to this kind of stuff. In my opinion, the out of band syncing and IP
assumption looks pretty easy. It is bring the original server backup,
syncing the data back to it, and transferring the IP back to it that gets a
little hairy.

Regards,

Bob

Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk at agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com