Phatsta wrote:
Okay so what I've found is that if you ask 10 people, you'll get 10 different opinions. Of course it all varies depending on how you've built these scenarios and worked with them before. The solution I'm tending to lean towards this far (meaning I haven't really decided yet) is this IP SAN:
And one of these switches for backbone:
High-speed 10 Gigabit Copper switching for small to mid-sized organizations
I'll also need to put in 10gbe cards in all three servers. In total, that puts me at just over $6000. I've been using QNAP for years and never been disappointed about support or support hours, or the quality of their products.
As you say, it's up to you to evaluate the technology involved.
Why this option doesn't make sense to me:
A $6K host from a Tier 1 vendor is going to be much more reliable than the QNAP.
The Tier 1 vendor will be able to offer you 4 hour response or 6 hour to resolution support agreements.
If the external storage goes down I can still revert to backups that resides on the backup NAS. I can even run them from there, although it'll be slow I'll still minimize downtime.
If that's the case, then you could do the same if the primary host went down. Run on the backup appliance/host. If that's acceptable for a central storage outage, it should be acceptable for a central host outage, especially since the host is less likely to go down and can be repaired more quickly.