Dear Toasters,
I would like to poll all the poor people on the list who cant afford/justify the need for clusters and instead use other cheap solution to provide redundancy of their data.
Even a simple IDE-RAID solution, with some kind of heartbeat system...
I have a couple of netapp's here on-site and in the event of a disaster, where the RAID array's are lost and i need to rebuild from scratch, i would like to have someother system serving the data i need, albeit at much lower performance.
I do have a spares kit to help me recover from events like MoBo/Processor dying etc.
Thanks for your time,
The Apple Xserve RAID box is a rather good value: 3.5TB for US$11K. FibreChannel connect it to a pair of 1U Xserve servers to export NFS and CIFS. Or use FreeBSD-5.x for NFS with Samba for CIFS, and get NetApp-style snapshots:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/snapshots.html
I haven't done this but would love to put my hands on an Xserve RAID box to front with FreeBSD-5.