Re: Xsan with WebObjects

Hi Brendan,

I have played with Xsan but never in a production environment.  I see  
no reason why you should face any issues with what you are trying to do.

Remember that Xsan imposes the overhead of needing Metadata  
Controllers to co-ordinate activity between clients.  And you finish  
up with two networks.  One a conventional IP network running and the  
other a Fibre Channel Network.  Unless you adopt the Infiniband  
products but then it gets even more expensive.

It seems to me that most of what you are trying to achieve could be  
handled by simply using a network share to place the shared files  
that the Apps Servers need to see.  That way, you only have a single  
network to deal with.  And servers can be mirrored or failover - two  
can share the same Xserve RAID for example.

Given that the files are very small (1Mb is nothing today) any  
latency benefits for serving them in a web environment are virtually  
insignificant.

Karl

On 11-Aug-05, at 3:50 PM, Brendan Duddridge wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Has anyone here ever tried using Apple's Xsan technology to serve  
> images from a web server?
>
> I will soon be putting together an environment with multiple web  
> servers and multiple WebObjects application servers. All Xserves.  
> Our application allows us to upload images and have them available  
> to the web server for displaying to the web browser. These are  
> typical web files anywhere between 500 bytes to 1 MB in size. There  
> will be LOTS of them. Millions actually. I was hoping that I could  
> use Xsan so my application servers can write the files and the web  
> servers can read the files all from the same location. This would  
> be an Xserve RAID.
>
> I've seen a lot of talk on using Xsan with video footage (very  
> large files --> few requests) and no talk about using Xsan with  
> many small files and many many requests.
>
> Is Xsan an appropriate solution to this problem? Or should I be  
> looking at a different solution? If so, what would that be? I want  
> a fully redundant environment so if something goes down, our web  
> site is still up and running just as before. I also want the  
> ability to upgrade the OS on various machines over time without  
> having to take down the site.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brendan
>
>
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