While I've never heard of these Nexsan boxes, I do know another approach to
the problem along similar lines. Get a external raid box (server attached
with built in differential raid controller). You can connect two pc's to
one such device as long as each scsi controller in the pc has a different
scsi ID.
Metastor makes a unit like this with a Symbios series 3 raid controller
built in, dual redundant fans and power supplies, and 10 slots for sca
80pin drives (we used seagate cheeta 18gig drives). Performance is quite
nice, you have your redundancy, and while the raid is a single point of
failure, you are using it for the very purpose it was designed. Even if one
pc and powersupply fails, or even a drive, you are still up. You have a hot
swap drive ready to sync up, a powersupply can be shipped next day air if
the vender is not local, and spinning up a new server takes no time if you
do proper backups.
Stephen Comoletti
Systems Administrator
Delanet, Inc. http://www.delanet.com
ph: (302) 326-5800 fx: (302) 326-5802
Thorkild Stray writes:
> One thing I am looking at currently is a RAID mounted and available for
> several machines. Nexsan has such a box. The Nexsan box is connected to
> each of the mailservers SCSI buses. This is kinda a cheap SAN solution as
> far as I know.
>
> My plan, although not using qmail this time (because of specific needs),
> is to have several mailservers in front, acting as primary and secondary
> MX (with additional offsite machines also working as secondary). When one
> of these machines fail, they will still be able to access a common spool,
> without using any form of networked filesystem. According to Nexsan, you
> should be able to give the machines priorties for access.
>
> The downside is the cost. I could get 4 mailservers for the prize of
> the Nexsan box.
>
> Any opions on this solution? One I would expect is that the Nexsan is a
> single point of failure, and well, it is. Even though it is planned to
> have RAID-5, with an extra disc available at all time. If the RAID box
> fails, it's down. I would then like to shut down the SMTP receivers so
> that it get queued remotly, but that could be a problem.
>
> --
> Thorkild Stray
>
>
