I'm the proud new owner of an IBM N3600 A20 (rebranded FAS2050C) with
20x30GB SAS disks.
I'm trying to determine the best way to get this thing set up, and
realized I have only a bit of a fuzzy understanding as to how the
clustering or failover filer head should work.
My initial thoughts were to aim for the following setup:
- Set up all 20 disks in a RAID-DP aggregate with one spare (17 data,
2 parity and one spare, or maybe two spares).
- Bond a NIC from the first controller with a NIC from the second
controller to give us a 2Gbps connection to our "storage network".
- Third and fourth NIC's would go to our regular network.
My hope was that I could lose one filer head and the other would take
over seamlessly. We'd lose half of our network bandwidth but still be
up and running.
However, it sounds like my understanding of how the clustering works
might have been a bit flawed and that I actually need to treat the
filer heads as two separate filers. So I may be forced to do something
like the following:
- Split my disks up between the two filers (7 data, 2 parity, one
spare -- or maybe I can have one spare available to both heads).
- Probably can't team NIC's from multiple filer heads meaning if I
team the two NIC's on the filer I can no longer connect to my
management network. I probably need to order more NIC's :(
- If I lose one head, I lose one aggregate unless manual intervention
is taken.
- Each filer has a different hostname/IP for network access.
This maybe gives me better performance, but at the expense of total
disk space and flexibility if my understanding is correct.
Maybe someone could help clear this up. It doesn't appear IBM has a
RedBook on clustering... I'm searching around in NOW and have come
across the Data ONTAP 7.3 Active/Active Configuration Guide which I am
now reading.
Is there something similar for Active/Passive setups (which seems to be
more what I am after) or other documents that would be recommended
reading? Any advice or best practices?
This filer will be serving NFS to a pair of ESX servers. We plan to
add a second shelf of disks later this year.
Thanks in advance. No sales inquiries please.
Ray