Dual Bus enclosures MSA 30

[michael wood_4]

Could anybody offer me an explanation of why to use a dual bus enclosure for NAS devices and how it works.
Many thanks

[Steven Clementi]

Explaination? Maybe more of an opinion...


For ANY server, including a NAS... one would use a DUAL bus shelf instead of a SINGLE bus self for better protection from failures. What I mean is this... With a dual bus shelf, you can have a RAID1 set across the 2 buses and if a BUS fails, then your safe. Also think about the possibility of the whole shelf failing.

Another reason is to have seperate I/O to different drives. Perhaps you have an app that will HEAVILY hit the drives. You can have 2 array controllers, one for BUS 1 and the other for BUS 2. You lose a bit for storage since you need to creay 2 arrays, but you get better performance as well as some protection (from a single dual bus Smart Array failure).


Would I use a dual bus MSA30 on a NAS? Maybe, if there was an absolute need for it. Maybe you want to seperate your data... UNIX vs. Windows and want to have seperate protection at the host level. I probably would not use a dual bus shelf, but rather 2 single bus shelves for expandability.


Steven

Steven

[michael wood_4]

many thanks

[Ted Buis]

This feature is also useful for creating a highly available configuration with two computers in a cluster for the NAS head.