> We would probably buy Dell stuff and according to their

specifications

> the iSCSI version of their SAN box only supports 2 servers.

Actually, the Dell literature is contradictory on this point. The EMC
site claims to support 8 hosts.

> So we were looking at Fibre Channel...
> We want to buy 2 of the boxes and have them either mirror or just take
> periodic snapshots. Right now we are either copying the data via nfs

or

> rsync over ssh through-out the network and it is starting to eat up a
> lot of our bandwidth (we are also looking into just continuing our
> current method of copying, but over a dedicated ethernet network).

The

> through-put is also important to us. Can 8 db servers really share

one

> SAN box and not overwhelm it?

It depends. Only you know the I/O load of your databases. Certainly
from what I just read about the Dell AX100 unit it looks like a
contender. It is certainly has a more reasonable price than the EMC
Clarion CX300 which I also like the look of.

You realize that having the servers share the SAN does not mean that you
will still need to move files across an Ethernet network.



For what it's worth Firebird v2.0 has an excellent new feature called
NBackup, it will allow you to create incremental backups of your
databases, which should reduce the transfer overhead (depending on how
much of your database is updated by transactions within the backup
interval).

> We are still trying to work out the details (both technical and
> budgetary), but I was hoping that maybe someone on this forum already
> had one in place for their databases and could let me know if this

thing

> is going to work before I shell out the tens of thousands of dollars

for

> it. If it does work then it would be worth the cost for us.

The problem I have in convincing my partner is that once you start with
a SAN, the cost of the switches, HBAs and software options just seems to
pile on.


Sean