Reccomendations for FC-attached storage appliance?

[Ansar Mohammed]

In a practical sense if a fiber channel card fails on a server, you'd
probably want to fail over the cluster to the second node until you resolved
the issue. Redundant HBAs require multipath software for the server to
properly load balance or fail over the disk IO. 

If you are considering this level of availability it really comes down to a
very limited number of companies, EMC, HP/Compaq or IBM in the PC world.
There are many workgroup solutions available, but with workgroup solutions,
come workgroup support.




> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Danny Howard
> Sent: September 21, 2005 2:13 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Cc: freebsd-scsi at freebsd.org
> Subject: Reccomendations for FC-attached storage appliance?
> 
>   [NOTE: cross-posting to freebsd-scsi and -questions ... please reply
>   direct to me, or followup to just ONE list.  I may post summary after.]
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have spent the past few weeks confusing around with different vendors
> to find a cool external disk solution that might offer high performance,
> and high availability for our production database.  My questio is
> two-fold:
> 
> 1) Would anyone like to share a preferred storage solution?  My dream is
> something where I can connect two FC controllers to two FreeBSD servers.
> If one controller fails, or if one server fails, I can still mount the
> same disks via the redundant server or controller.
> 
> It sounds like most solutions have the disks on one controller or the
> other, so if a controller fails, the disks are inaccessible until you
> swap out the failed controller.  The Applex Xserve RAID comes to mind.
> 
> 2) Would anyone like to share a preferred HBA?  I am constantly
> frustrated by suggested solutions because it seems that every disk
> appliance only ever supports one HBA.  For example, the Apple ... only
> supports LSI7202XP.  My research has found zero evidence that this is
> supported by FreeBSD.  So, if that wont work, I should just run Linux?
> Or has someone stress-tested their favorite HBA and found it to be
> totally robust in some configuration ... ?
> 
> Thanks a bunch!
> 
> Sincerely,
> -danny
> 
> --
> http://dannyman.toldme.com/
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-
> unsubscribe at freebsd.org"