Minimizing Downtime on a Dell Blade Chassis

[Jagger15]

I am trying to come up with a solution on how to minimize downtime on our web servers hosted on our Dell Blade Chassis.

One option is splitting content (data, images, etc.) that will take some time to implement so what can we do with less effort. i.e. use sync software to also replicate out to the SAN so we have a copy of all files there that we could point another webserver to quickly. Part of that would be having a spare blade around at all times to move a site to.

Anybody have anymore suggestions??

Thanks

 

[NickFerrar]

How dynamic is the web server data? Is there a database etc on it? You basically have a choice between hardware syncing (clustering) or as you mention software syncing. If the data is very static and the blades each have RAID1 mirrors you could also consider a set of spare disks that you build into the mirror (fail the second drive, replace it, build replacement drive from first drive, keep original second drive on shelf, if blade fails build new blade using the disk on the shelf).

On the hardware side there's a few Dell articles regarding blade redundancy such as:

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q05-20050171-Benson.pdf

and

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q06-20060273-Devireddy.pdf

although you should probably call Dell and get some consultancy if doing advanced stuff.