I am a sysadmin for an ISP and we currently have a single server 20 scsi drive raid that stores our maildir format mail data, we have about 105 gigs of mail. Our problem is that we have a single point of failure. We have backups sure but if we lost our drive thats over 5 hours to copy from a backup and getting a new server up. So my question is, can glusterfs help in this area? If i were to setup a 3 server cluster and say each server had its own 200 gig raid, would glusterfs put an identical copy of my mail data on all 3 servers letting me lose up to 2 servers before i lose my data? Or do I completely not understand what glusterfs does? I was looking at starfish which sounds similiar to me and they claim to be a turbo charged google filesystem. I was initially looking at a DRBD / OCFS2 solution, but ditched that in favor of just rebuilding our current box as it is but with a fresh updated os but remain a single server with no live spare. The decision was based on keeping it simple and due to not wanting to buy another scsi raid ($$$). But if we could put together 2 servers with SATA II raids (cheap $) and have glusterfs replicate the data between all 3 servers that would be cool. I look forward to any info this list may provide. Thanks! =) Brandon
