Submission + - Redundant commodity hardware for Linux SANs
Dishwasha writes: "The capabilities offered by The iSCSI Enterprise Target Project and LVM2 really make commodity SAN solutions for clustering or remote raw storage a possibility. iSCSI or Fiberchannel SAN equipment has typically been very expensive and most of the lower cost equipment has minimal expansion flexibility that you would typically get from a high dollar EMC solution. I see one of the bars to entry is hardware redundancy not at the disk level, but at the processing level. Even the lower end Dell/EMC CX3 and AX100/150 solutions have redundant storage processors and in some cases, backplane redundancy to the disks. Is there any commodity i386/x64 hardware out there that provides CPU redundancy rather than just multi-processing? If so, does anybody have any experience using this with Linux Hotplug CPU Support? At least some of the commercial hardware SAN solutions require a full outage for service on a storage processor, but allowing for hot CPU, RAM, backplane, and controller would definately be a plus if anyone has any experience with getting these components redundant on the i386/x64 platform."