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Marc JacobsFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Recommendations for Web Server & iSCSI SAN

Hi,

I'm planning a storage solution using the following:
2 x Web Server's for redundancy using Neverfail in my DMZ and i'm looking at an iSCSI SAN to store the images for my website. The area i'm needing assistance with is to do with the networking and firewall elements of this project.

My web servers will be a DMZ and i'm trying to work out how the webserver will access/talk to the SAN.

What recommendations and advice can you tell me about this project.

Thanks
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Hedley Phillips
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The servers will talk to the SAN over TCP/IP and through switches.

You run iscsi initiator on the hosts (web servers) and these multi path through to the san box.

We have an AX150i SAN box which is two controllers in the one box.

In our case we have two servers, both with 3 NICS. One is for the LAN, the other two are purely for the SAN. The two SAN NICS connect through both switches (one NIC to one switch A, the other NIC to switch B) and then split into the SAN box, one to one controller (A), the other to the other side (B). This is repeated on the other server.

This way you can have a NIC on a server fail, or a switch fail or one half of the SAN box fail and it will reroute the data through the working side using the Powerpath software.

The nice thing about this is that all this data is on its own LAN so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the network.

I can post some images when I am back in the office tomorrow if you would like that explain better the way the connections work.
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Yes please that would be great.
What firewall / switches do you use?
We use Dell PowerConnect 2716 switches

cheap as chips as it is all normal ethernet cables rather than fibre.

More details of AX unit here: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_ax150?c=us&l=en&s=biz&cs=555

The servers sit behind Fortigate 60 units.

Dell have been pushing their 6xxx series instead, nearly 10x the price than the 2716's.
Thanks
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Hedley Phillips
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Thanks for your help here, and especially the diagram, it really helped us to understand.