"Leon Woestenberg" writes:

"Nik Simpson" wrote in message
. ..
Leon Woestenberg wrote:

I am shopping for a 120 TB SAN solution which will probably be
accessed by a cluster of servers through a shared filesystem.

1. More about the host OS requirements (i.e. which OS platforms does the
solution have to support)

The SAN is written to and read from through a cluster of, say N, Linux
servers.
The cluster processes 200 datastreams coming in a steady 1 Mbit/second each,
of which the results (also about 1 Mbit/second) are stored.

As a result of processing, some very low bitrate metadata about the streams
is
entered into a database, which is stored on the SAN as well.

We need redundancy throughout, i.e. no single point of failure. The cluster
servers will have to fail-over their processing applications.

Every data stream is received by two servers out of the cluster, where the
secondary acts as a hot spare, processing and storing the data stream if
the primary server fails to do so.

The hardest part (IMHO) will be to make sure, that in case of network
or server failure, the secondary will notice exactly where the primary
server
was in the data stream and take over from there.


Doesn't sound like you need a SAN. Maybe some sort of NAS, which could
be on IDE due to the very low performance requirements. But its probably
not worth it to buy an FC card for each Linux box and the necessary FC
switches, etc. when you would be using about .1% of the bandwidth of an
FC link. Depending on the value of "N" for "N Linux boxes" and where
the 200 data streams are coming from, maybe writing it to local disk on
a couple machines for redundancy is an option. With 250GB IDE drives
easily available, it is easy to stick 2TB (maybe 1.5TB with RAID5 + hot
spare) in a fairly small box these days.

--
Douglas Siebert

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain