Re: Xsan with WebObjects

On 12/08/2005, at 5:50 AM, Brendan Duddridge wrote:

> 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.


We have a customer we set up xsan for, but they are a TV network  
using it in the convential way: large files. For your need it sounds  
very much that a dedicated gigabit ethernet network might do the job,  
but the it is easy to decide: just add up the bandwidth you'll be  
expecting. image size x images per second being served across your  
web servers from the RAID.

san offers a couple of nice advantages over ethernet:

* speed
* distributed drives (you can have 15 different RAID subsystems over  
your fibre network all appearing to be one virtual drive space)
* reliability (the metadata controller can fail and the backup will  
kick in: this is akin to a hot failover file server)

There is no reason to suspect san will not perform well with small  
files, but there is significant overhead for each request on the  
metadata controller machine which gets passed over ethernet.

Maybe your best bet is to approach Apple for a loan setup and try it  
out. I know that in Australia at least they are keen to get new  
higher end customers and would be happy to help.


Ari Maniatis



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