This session went into depth into the state of Novell Cluster Services in the new world. It was interesting! I also was introduced to Novell's Business Continuity Cluster product. I had been peripherally aware of it, but I hadn't taken a real look at it. This is exactly what we want to have to set up the backup datacenter in Bond Hall. But we'll never get the money for it.
That said, BCC supports cluster-level failover. If Cluster 1 fails, activate Cluster 2. It doesn't handle the data replication, but all the big SAN vendors provide some way to do that. This is the kind of thing that we need. It also provides a failover in under 5 minutes if all the conditions are correct, which is very nice.
Another thing I brought out of this session is the concept of NSS-level RAID1. I knew I could do it, but it didn't occur to me that this could be a data-export method. So we set up an iSCSI target in Bond Hall, and then mirror all of the WUF pools over there. Writes will be slower due to the transit-time to the off-site, but if Bad People blow up 32nd street where our datacenter is, all the data is live in Bond Hall! Interesting idea... will have to ponder that one. The NSS guys in the Tech Lab endorsed it so long as our network is up to the task, something that I'm not 100% on.
Tags: novell, brainshare
That said, BCC supports cluster-level failover. If Cluster 1 fails, activate Cluster 2. It doesn't handle the data replication, but all the big SAN vendors provide some way to do that. This is the kind of thing that we need. It also provides a failover in under 5 minutes if all the conditions are correct, which is very nice.
Another thing I brought out of this session is the concept of NSS-level RAID1. I knew I could do it, but it didn't occur to me that this could be a data-export method. So we set up an iSCSI target in Bond Hall, and then mirror all of the WUF pools over there. Writes will be slower due to the transit-time to the off-site, but if Bad People blow up 32nd street where our datacenter is, all the data is live in Bond Hall! Interesting idea... will have to ponder that one. The NSS guys in the Tech Lab endorsed it so long as our network is up to the task, something that I'm not 100% on.
Tags: novell, brainshare