Re: SAN vs Internal Disks

I'm getting a san together to consolidate my disk space usage for my
servers. It's iscsi based and I'll be pxe booting my servers from it.
The idea is to keep spares on hand for one system (the san) and not have
to worry about spares for each specific storage system on each server.
This also makes growing filesystems and such pretty simple. Redundancy
is also good since I'll have two iscsi switches plugged into two cisco
ethernet switches and two different raid controllers on the jbod. I'll
start plugging my servers into each switch for further redundancy. In
the end I could loose disks, ethernet switches, cables, iscsi switches,
raid controller, whatever, and it keeps on moving.

That said, I'm not putting my postgres data on the san. The DB server
will boot from the san and use it for is OS, but there are 6 15k SAS
disks in it setup with raid-10 that will be used for the postgres data
mount. The machine is a dell 2950 and uses an LSI raid card.

The end result is a balance of cost, performance, and reliability. I'm
using iscsi for the cost, reliability, and ease of use, but where I need
performance I'm sticking to local disks.

schu