Multi node storage, ZFS

[Ben Morrow]

Quoth Michal <michal at ionic.co.uk>:
> 
> I do aswell :D The thing is, I see it two ways; I worked for a a huge
> online betting company, and we had the money for HP MSA's and big
> expensive SAN's, then we have a lot of SMB's with no where near the
> budget for that but the same problem with lots of data and the need for
> backend storage for databases. It's all well and good having 1 ZFS
> server, but it's fragile in the the sense of no redundancy, then we have
> 1 ZFS server and a 2nd with DRBD, but that's a waste of money...think 12
> TB, and you need to pay for another 12TB box for redundancy, and you are
> still looking at 1 server. I am thinking a cheap solution but one that
> has IO throughput, redundancy and is easy to manange and expand across
> multiple nodes

If you do it right, you could have the 'SAN' box be one of the boxes
full of discs, with some or all of the others able to take over the
'SAN' role if it fails. That way you get redundancy without having to
have a machine sit idle. (You're still using more discs than you
strictly need to hold that much data, of course, but you can't avoid
that.)

Ben