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Two BladeCenter S Chasis in a Geographically Dispersed Cluster

The decision has been made to use the IBM BladeCenter S for running and storing our file based applications, with a fully redundant BladeCenter S chassis running in an alternate location on site. Our current setup uses a similar two location BladeCenter + Storage Appliance configuration but the primary location currently stores all of the live data, quorum info, etc for our File Server Cluster. The backup location's storage appliance is updated using asynchronous mirroring so the appliance is simply being used for backup and not a live failover solution.

While the BladeCenter S is still not the ideal solution for our needs, the decision has been made. I'm looking for the best possible solution for "clustering" volumes in order to utilize synchronous replication between chassis. In other words, we would like to combine a volume from each BladeCenter into a single logical device so that it would appear to be a single volume.

Can synchronous replication be accomplished by the storage controllers in the BladeCenter S or will our solution need to be software level mirroring?

While our data storage needs are small, it is absolutely necessary that we have zero down time. That is why we are going to such great lengths to make every piece of hardware and software fully redundant. Your help is very appreciated.

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TheWrongWay

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IBM in the past has been very cryptic in their responses. With our current appliances we were told by IBM that it would be possible. After testing, reading Redbooks and asking the same question over and over we were finally told the solution is not available and abandoned by IBM even before we purchased the appliances. I was hoping to hear from someone that might actually have a solution in place.

As for Double-Take... great company, great software. I imagine it will be on the top of our list for solutions. My previous tests with Double-Take revealed a much longer failover time than simply using Microsoft Clustering but it's replication functionality makes it extremely appealing.

Thank you for your help. :)