On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Nathan O. Siemers wrote:
- A Netapp 760 Filer.
Since you're only looking at two boxes accessing it, go with gigabit ethernet instead of etherchannel or single 100B-T if your origins can handle it. The 760 is nice in that it has 3 redundant power supplies. I would also consider buying another one and cluster the two together. Put one database on one and the other on the remaining one. If one of them decides to flake out for some reason the second one will take over the first one's identity in addition to its own in a matter of seconds. Also, get redundant power supplies for the disk shelves and put them on two independent power grids. Do something similar with the head(s).
- An Auspex file server.
Ugly, but not without merit for some applications. For your application, I'd try to stay away from it, but if you can acquire database file sanity check/incremental and differential backup tools for SunOS, it may be advantageous. OTOH, the backup devices will still probably be the bottleneck.
- Beefed up local RAID.
This is a good possibility especially since you're planning to use it with only two servers. Consider the cost and reliability issues, as well as administrative ease. You may get a performance boost over NAS boxes with gigabit if you use Fibre Channel instead of SCSI.
Above all onsider your current disk use and projected growth and pit it against the ease of expanding your database files. With NACs this is trivial up to 1.5 TB, which from what I hear will shortly be raised.
Tom