SAN pre-purchase advice

[etstv]

Hello,

We are about to buy a HP P2000 iSCSI MSA Dual Controller SAN solution. Pricing is very attractive right now with HPs 50% cashback offer. We will be maxing out the 12 bays with 2TB drives = total capacity 24TB.

Before we go ahead I just have a quick question Im hoping someone can answer for me..........

>> As I understand it - RAID covers us for drive failure and the dual controller for controller failure - but how do we implement this? Do I need to split into 2 seperate RAID arrays (12TB each) - one controller for each and mirror it with Remote Snap? Or is there a way I can use my full capacity but still be covered for controller failure.

Many thanks,

Mark

[hvhari]

Having dual path  from each host involved here to the MSA & having a multipathing software configured  will serve the purpose of controller failure redundancy.

[etstv]

Hi Hari,

Thanks for the reply. I understand a bit better now.....

So my setup would be SAN --- 2 cables --- SERVER (CentOS using the Device-Mapper Multipath feature - http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.2/DM_Multipath/)

And I can get the full capacity.

Sounds like the way to go.

Thanks again,

Mark :)