I have recently started looking at server resilience and availability in the context of a hardware failure or hardware upgrade. I've come to the conclusion that it would be very desirable if terrabyte-scale data did not need to be restored from backup. This isn't a commercial server - so I'm interested in minimum cost approaches.
With this in mind, I'm interested to discover what represents state-of-the-art from the perspective of the OS and its configuration. Issues I envisage are: * With NAS, it would be desirable to have a Linux filesystem rather than access files over CIFS - this raises further questions about protocol... is NFS as hopelessly outdated as it seems? Are there any products that offer NFS access? Are any of them secure? * With a SAN, questions of filesystem features are diminished - but questions of access protocol remain. What is best supported by gentoo? * Do any gentooists have any inexpensive hardware configurations that work especially well? Any hints or tips?
