I’ve begun some initial looks at some SAN hardware for shared storage.  I’m just looking at iSCSI.  Fibre Channel is out of the question due to price.  I already have a home grown iScsi SAN/cluster running on top of NetWare, but it’s limited to iScsi Initiator access using NSS.  While its doing it’s job, it’s basically featureless.  Moreover, while the cluster resources are redundant, the shared storage is not.  There are some iSCSI appliances out there that will allow for redundancy between units.

That’s the major feature I’m looking for.  I hate the idea of having all of our eggs in one basket.  Even our core switches have redundant supervisor blades and power supplies and we have redundant port channel links to the IDFs spread out on separate gig blades in the event that one of those eat themselves.  We really need that redundancy with our storage.  We have a nice infrastructure in place to allow for iSCSI traffic between redundant sites.  Our main campus is a couple of miles away from our secondary campus, but we own the fiber on the poles in between.  So it’s one consitant LAN, no WAN links to worry about.  Beyond that, I’ve read a bit about snapshots and being able to back up data without the hassle of agent software on remote servers that has a tendancy to crap out.

Initially I’m looking at two devices, Lefthand’s Multisite San and EMC’s CLARiiON AX4.  If anyone has any advice, I’m all ears…er, eyes.