Hi,

We've been running v4.2 for a very long time, and my network admin *really*
wants me to find a way to remove our IB box as a potential "single point of
failure" out of our network equation. We have way too much time invested in
IB/FB to migrate off the platform (and I don't want to use Oracle anyhow),
so I want to get people's feedback on a proposed deployment option.

Currently, we have a single-processor AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz with an
Adaptec 3200 RAID running Win2000. We have the OS and IB running on a 9Gb
RAID 1 partition, and the data on 72Gb RAID 1+0 partition. If the database
machine fails, our entire infrastructure goes down with it. In the next few
weeks, I should have our production server running FB RC2 in place of v4.2.

One concept for adding some degree of fault-tolerance to our IB/FB
installation involves reusing much of our existing hardware in a NAS
configuration.

We could add two relatively small and inexpensive non-RAID servers which
would both have Firebird installed in identical configurations. One of the
machines would not have the Firebird service running most of the time. Both
servers would be configured to use a third (larger expensive RAID) machine
as their data drive. I figure putting two gigabit ethernet adapters in the
storage server, and gigbit ethernet in the two FB machines would give
reasonable network performance.

Theoretically, if the primary FB machine goes down (or requires
maintenance), the FB process could be stopped on that machine and started on
the backup FB machine for a rudimentary fail-over system. Granted, the
storage server can still be considered a "single point of failure", but my
network admin figures a file server running no major application process of
its own is easier to keep running 24x7 than other machines.

Does anyone care to comment on this potential network design? I'm a bit
leary of sucking all that data through even a large ethernet pipe. Will
having the disks in a different box really kill performance?

Best Regards,

David Montgomery
montgomery@...



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