Steven S. Critchfield wrote: > Okay, first I want you to think of a couple of things. The experience > we have at my office is that networked drives suffer from too little > performance when compared to local drives when used to host many root > drives. > > Our attempt was using 7 drives in a raid 5 in a CoRaid AoE box. 7 drives > should have given us really great performance. As it was, it was limited > by the ability of the switch to handle the throughput of the root and tmp > drives of as many machines as we virtualized. We spent too much time in > IOWait. Even now, we are experiencing times with high IOWait on our > vmware machines with local drives. > > High availability and budget don't usually go together for anything that > scales much. > > I would also go out and say I don't think you are going to get the high > availability when you talk about the virtualized machines. If your host > takes a crap on you, you lose all the running instances. It is possible > that will take portions of your system down. > > If you are just looking for raw secondary storage, I think you will be > happy with DRBD and heartbeat. I have built a DRBD system, and set it up > with the ability to fire up many services to keep high availability for > the drive storage. It isn't too hard. It is more time to describe it here > right now. I will write it up shortly. > > Critch > > I'll second this. The big names in storage do dedicated fiber connections from the servers to the SAN via dedicated switches which have been custom built to handle the type of traffic storage devices generate / require. They also offer features like "instant snapshots" and parallel backups.
You really do get what you pay for in the SAN field. Granted, it is not cheap but if you have the need then you have the need. Andrew Farnsworth --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
