Simple external shared disk

[rdurant]

Hello all,

I'm trying to find a simple external enclosure that can house 1 or 2 IDE drives to be shared between 2 servers.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks,
Ryan

 

[wooglin]

Ximeta Netdisk

http://www.ximeta.com

80-120-160GB, approx the same price as external USB/Firewire disks.
Can attach directly to your router, giving both users read-access, only downside is only one user can have write access at a time (although they are suppossed to be working on a driver update that will allow for users to have both read/write at the same time)

Can also attach directly to a computer with a crossover ethernet cable or USB 2.0.

 

[Rols]

Sounds like you are after more of a NAS product?

You cannot share a disk between 2 servers at the hardware level unless you have a layer of software to manage the read / write access.

 

[rdurant]

Well, I'm not sure what I should label the product as (NAS or otherwise), but I would assume that if a product is advertised as being shareable, then it would be accompanied by the necessary tools and utilities to manage all aspects of what is advertised.

Are you saying that the product recommended cannot work as I have described? Can it work in a failover situation?

What product do you recommend?

Ryan

 

[Chacalinc]

Ryan,

You have 2 types of disks, attached via channel (SCSI, FC) or attached via network (NAS).

Channel devices can be connected to 2 or more servers, but you need software in order to protect the data, because if one server has mounted the disk, others should not (data corruption is involved if 2 servers access the same disk at the same time). This software should be "cluster". This fits for failover situations (clusters HA).

If you need to "share the files" (not only physical device), then the solution is NAS. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. NAS is basicly a FileServer, where all servers use the files via NFS/CIFS and all servers can use the same data at the same time.

Hope this helps you.

 

[wooglin]

Apologies for my initial reply. I thought you were looking for a simple file sharing solution for two systems. My bad.

 

[rdurant]

Wooglin: It maybe that I gave the wrong description.

Chacalinc: I think I understand much better now. From what you are saying then a NAS solution is not the best option for a failover situation. A NAS solution cannot work in a cluster?

This then goes back to my initial question, do you have any recommendations. I'm looking for something as simple as possible.

Ryan.

 

[Chacalinc]

Ryan,

NAS could work in cluster, but is not the best solution.

If you want something as simple as possible you can use even a single external SCSI or FC disk. It depends on the space required to store.

With SCSI you will need a Y cable to do the following:

+--------+         +--------+
| Server |         | Server |
+--------+         +--------+
      \               /
       \             /
        +-----------+
              |
           +------+
           | DISK |
           +------+

In this picture, disk has no terminators (they are in the servers), SCSI ID server 1=7, server2=6, disk=0.

If you do it with FC, you can use a FC-AL HUB (there is no Y cables in FC connections).

Remember, with this configuration you *need* cluster software.

Cheers.