[ale] ATL Colocation and file server suggestions

[Jim Kinney]

2009/1/20 Ken Ratliff <forsaken at targaryen.us>:

> If I had my way, I'd yank the drives out of the servers entirely, just build
> a nice sexy SAN and export disks to the servers via iSCSI. But that's....
> expensive.

Of course a SAN uses some combination of drive bunching (RAID or
otherwise) to make a pile of drives appear as a single large storage
container. And then the data storage is crippled by bandwidth between
the SAN head and the systems using the data.

Repeat after me: "Single point of failure".

A SAN just moves the problem from the server to a large number of servers.

Unless there are TWO SANs and a system-level RAID for their access
relying on a single SAN is a head shot waiting to happen.

Best case scenario I've tried to implement but couldn't get past
microsoft-based managers: Hardware (real hardware) RAID 10 on server
with a software RAID1 between server disks and SAN. Since _most_ data
usage is read-intensive, heaviest reads occur on local drives (Looking
for a way to set priorities in software RAID for bandwidth
considerations - ideas?) leaving bandwidth to SAN for infrequent
writes.
-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III