Yes, I plan on virtualizing servers for H/A purposes. Yeah... long-term project with the problem of no funding. The original recommendation when I first started here was to use a NAS and a couple small "pizza box" servers for domain controllers. Wish I'd gone that route now. The problem I see with a JBOD is that I want to share the storage out over two different servers for H/A reasons. Currently we use DFS to mirror the files on two servers. I don't like that. I want something better, but still be able to share the files out over both servers, so that if one goes down, I can quickly switch people to the other one. To me, that means a small, low-end SAN. No, I don't need a high-end SAN. You are correct that a Tier 2 or lower SAN vendor would probably be more than sufficient for what I need. I originally had grand plans for mirrored SANs, with one off-site, but have come to realize that is probably more expensive and complicated than we can afford, not to mention we don't have the bandwidth for it. :-)
At this point, my plans are for a "storage appliance" of some sort backed up to tape (speed of restore is not critical. Simply being able to restore it *is* critical.) Also, I want to convert my big, massive Dell servers into VMWare hosts and run a couple virtual domain controllers on each one, with the virtual servers themselves being loaded off the storage appliance. I think that should be sufficient, if not slightly overkill. From: Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 1:34 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Opinion on rebuilding Raid 5 I thought we'd disabused you of the notion that you need a [high end] SAN? Granted the high end ones are nice and they have their uses, but your just looking to store files on it. Are you going to virtualize all your servers, rely on Vmotion or some other tool to ensure high availability, or do you need to provide data access to a large number of disparate servers? Consider looking at some of the lower end offerings from Synology and Qnap (heard good things), and avoid Drobo (heard not so good things) and stay away from Buffalo (don't touch that, it's pure evil). This "project" has been on your dockett for over a year now, hasn't it? Awaiting funding? The Synology and Qnap offerings are pretty affordable, and get you into iSCSI access realm. Also, whatever happened to your project about setting up your own storage server? With Windows Server 2008 R2 having access to the iSCSI target software MS recently released, that becomes an option now, too. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
