Hi,
 
We have standardised on Sun/Solaris NW Servers and Storage Nodes, and
different types of clients (Windows, Solaris, AIX and Linux).
 
Currently, the NW server(s) control the process but also do a
significant amount of backup (i.e. move plenty of data between clients
and devices).
 
We scale out by adding new Solaris NW Storage Nodes.
 
Current concerns are :-
 
1)  How far can we scale out before running into a limit ?
 
2)  How can we enhance the resilience of this approach ?
 
My thinking would be to stop using the NW server(s) as Storage Nodes.
We would use them as backup servers only (no backup data traffic would
pass through them). Hopefully this would free up sufficient performance
to allow virtually infinite scalability by adding additional external
Storage Nodes as necessary.
 
Obviously all the clients can be configured with primary and secondary
storage nodes, so resilience at this level is catered for.
 
However the NW server(s) become a single point of failure.  The thinking
here would be to use SunCluster on the NW Server(s) to provide higher
availability.
 
It would be useful if active-active clustering was possible.  i.e. NW
Server 1 running on Physical Node A and  NW Server 2 running on Physical
Node B.  If Node A fails, both NW Servers run on Node B.  I am not sure
if this can be done (certainly not on Windows clustering).
 
Other approaches such as a cold standby backup server can be considered,
but I do not really know what is possible with Solaris.
 
I would really appreciate any comments, criticisms, suggestions on the
above, in particular, from people who have tried or are using any of
these approaches.
 
 
John Hope-Bailie
E-mail:    johnhb AT channeldata.co DOT za

 

To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and 
type "signoff networker" in the
body of the email. Please write to networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu 
if you have any problems
wit this list. You can access the archives at 
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER