Need Help With File Server Deployment

[kd7gab]

Hello,

I am currently preparing to deploy a new server system for my company and have come up against a problem that has become difficult to solve. We are going to be occupying two buildings, separated by several miles, with a variety of users from different departments at each end. Ultimately, what we want to achieve is to have a synchronized copy of the file servers at each end, giving us gigabit file access for the users and redundant copies of the files. We have about 60 users currently but that is expected to increase dramatically over the next couple of years. We will be employing some form of wan connection at 10 mbps or faster. Synchronous file locking is my biggest concern at this point.

I have been able to find all kinds of clustered file systems but nothing that seems to be suited for this kind of use. My hardware vendor has been helpful in that they have proposed a workable solution but it may cause a numerous amount of files that end up with two different, concurrent versions. This is why synchronous locking is important for this implementation. I know that this has been done before but I can't seem to find any relevant information.

Does anyone out there have any ideas on this or at least somewhere to point me to? Anything at this point would be welcomed.

Thank you all,

Jon

[jledhead]

I think maybe you are looking for this drbd - Google Search

drbd would be the clustered filesystem. The only other thing I could think of that would be close to dfs (sounds like what you want) would be a cron job for rsync that fires every minute. it would work, but drbd seems like a better fit.

[kd7gab]

jledhead,

Thanks for your reply, I just, finally, stumbled upon the useful set of documentation for DRBD 8.0 and it claims, when coupled with GFS, to do exactly what we need. I am going to see about setting up some VMs and start testing this very soon. I'll post my results and, hopefully, this will turn out great.

~Jon

[jledhead]

I'll post my results and, hopefully, this will turn out great.

~Jon

I would like to hear how it goes. I haven't had a chance to play with that yet, I have done lvs and heartbeat setups though and wanted to give this a try.

[kd7gab]

Well, I just got out of a very frustrating meeting with my boss and the requirements for this system have just been changed such that we'll be implementing high NAS units. So down the line if I get the opportunity to play with this I'll post again. So thanks for the info.

Regards,

Jon