What you are saying is called "NAS". With SAN, you can achieve true no single point of failure. If you disks are fiber connected, and you are doing RAID over them, you can have two disks (raid-1) serving two computers (not simultaniously). Viola!As far as I know, the cost of SAN is very high. It also gives your more GB then you need. And if you need less GB than what given - you just pay too much extra on each GB.
Also, don't forget the equipment using to work with fiber optic cables (control cards, switches and so on).
At this cost I think you can build a HA solution: 1. A red rubin DNS. 2. heart bit. 3. using another computer for db/files and two servers to serve the files (sure, has lower performance).
With NAS, you introduce a third computer, that serves the files to both servers (single point of failure), you need some way to ballance the load (round robin DNS, in your case, which suffers serious problems when trying to cope with a failure).
I'm not even sure that the fiber option is so expensive (quite honestly, I don't know). In any case, it appears as if the entire industry is shifting torwards NAS (Netapps, special Emc hardware that incorporates an NFS server, etc.). This means that most IT managers agree with you, on one level or another.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Open Source integration consultant Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/
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