We're planning on building a cluster to handle web operations but we've run into a dilemma on storage. From all the reading I've done it appears that the best case would a fibre channel SAN with GFS; however we'd like to keep the cost down but still retain very reliable storage. In our cost cutting efforts I've come up with an idea that I think would float, but that our hardware vendor (whose trying to sell us the SAN) doesn't think is possible. I'd like to replace a SAN device with 2 servers clustered together and connected to an external SCSI array. Only one of the servers would be accessing the array, the other would just be a standby in case of a failover. The accessing server would use GNBD and GFS to export the block device to all clients which of course would run the clients of GNBD and GFS. The documentation seems to imply this is a viable alternative to a SAN but I'd like to know if anyone is using this type of setup or if there would be a reason why it wouldn't work properly. I would appreciate any help since I'm not an expert on this yet. (but should be soon due to RedHats courses). All servers in the cluster will have dual ethernet, etc so hopefully bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. Thanks in advance. David Brieck -- Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
