(Inexpensive) Highly Available Storage Systems
The internet has pampered our users by giving them 99.9% uptime. Now every corporation needs to have similar availability to 99.9%. One part of high availability solution is the storage. In the good old proven corner we have SAN and NAS storage solutions. They are not always highly available (you must ensure the system has more than one controller, in case one controller is broken, and RAID 5 is nowhere enough these days, choose RAID 6, and dont forget network rendundancy), but they are almost always expensive. In the era where IT Directors forced to think 'cost transformation', we always welcome cost-saving alternatives. New hardware developments influenced our infrastructure options, lets write the factors down: abundance of cheap gigabit ethernet card & router -> this allow us to forget expensive fiber connetivity, and allow us to leverage newly developed distributed systems. cheap large SATA drives -> large commodity storage for the masses Development o...