Use Of Shared Storage In High Availability Arrays?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday January 27, 2001 @05:08AM from the figuring-things-out dept.

urbanjunkie asks: "I want to ensure my web site/database farm/whatever is as available as possible, so I checked out many HA (High Availability) packages for Linux. It seems that they -all- seem to want me to use shared storage. I don't want to use shared storage since it moves the point of failure to the disk array. I know that the disk array can be RAIDed etc, but what about a fire, power loss and any of the other things that can go wrong? I'd prefer to have something that replicated changes made to one disk to another disk located in a separate PC that may well be in a location 100 metres away. Is there anything open sourced that can do this?"

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Re:Stick with shared storage... by weave · 2001-01-27 21:28 · Score: 3

EMC has storage that can be mirrored over a fiber or even copper at speeds as low as 100 Mbps allowing a mirrored HA array to be stashed off-site. It tracks disk writes and duplicates them at the other site. It can even batch up the sync writes to occur in off-peak hours if desired.
I guess it's how much availability you want. That last 0.001% drives costs through the roof. Many modern disk arrays have everything redundant and hot swappable, including not just disk modules, but power supplies, fans, and controllers.
Set up a nice HA disk array and cluster the servers and you too can run all of your critical services on one subnet!