Hi together, Currently I am planning a storage network for making backups of several servers. At the moment there are several dedicated backup server for it: 4 nodes; each node is providing 2.5 TB disk space and exporting it with CIFS over Ethernet/1 GBIT. Unfortunately this is not a very flexible way of providing disk space for backup purpose. The problem: the size of the file server is varying and therefore the backup-space is not used very well - both in an economic and technical view. I want to redesign the current architecture and I try to make it more flexible. I have the following idea: 1. The 4 Nodes become a storage backend; they provide disk space as an ISCSI device. 2. A new Server takes the role of a Gateway to the storage network. It will aggregate the several nodes by including the iscsi devices and building a ZFS storage pool over them. In this way I reached a big pool of storage. The space of this pool could be export with CIFS to the file-servers for making backups. 3. To reach good performance I could establish a dedicated GBIT-Ethernet network between the backup nodes and the gateway. In addition the Gateway get ISCSI HBA. The gateway should than be connected with the local network with several GBIT uplinks. 4. To reach high availability I could build a fail-over cluster of the ZFS gateway.
What do you think about this architecture? Could the gateway be a bottleneck? Do you have any other ideas or recommendations? Regards, Dak -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
