[Beowulf] Question on hgh performance, low cost Fileserver

[John Hearns]

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 17:12 -0800, Michael Will wrote:
> I have not completely though this out yet, but what about something like 
> this:
> 
> Have 1U or 2U servers with internal drives split into two (software) 
> raid volumes.
> Connect them with 1 ethernet cable to a switch fabric to serve half of 
> the storage.
> 
> Connect them in pairs with the second gigabit ethernet cable directly 
> (crossover,
> same cable as non-crossover since it is gigabit, most mainboards have 
> two nics down
> nowadays)
> use network-block-device to mirror one of the two groups to the other 
> server.
> 
Interesting... a sort of 'poor man's multipathing'
You would have to closely monitor that the mirroring over the network
link is up and running.
Also look at http://www.drbd.org/ which might be the cat's pyjamas for
this application.