With more users interacting, working, purchasing, and communicating over the network than ever before, Web 2.0 infrastructure is taking center stage in many organizations. Demand is rising, and companies are looking for ways to tackle the performance and scalability needs placed on Web infrastructure without raising IT operational expenses. Today companies are turning to efficient, high-performance, open source solutions as a way to decrease acquisition, licensing, and other ongoing costs and stay within budget constraints.
Virtually every server in a modern datacenter depends on network connectivity in order to access resources and provide services to clients. The best practice for enhancing network connectivity is to configure multiple physical paths to the network so that if a network adapter, cable, or upstream switch fails due to equipment problems or human error, the second path continues to carry traffic. Redundant physical connections must be complemented with software that can fail over between links in the event of an error. The Solaris™ Operating System supports IP multipathing (IPMP). This allows a system to be configured to automatically fail over a group of IP addresses hosted on multiple interfaces while load sharing outbound traffic across all available links.
A flexible, low-cost alternative to Fibre Channel interfaces and dedicated storage area network (SAN) hardware, the Internet Small Computer System (iSCSI) standard is an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard that is typically implemented over Ethernet technology.
Creating a configuration consisting of devices with iSCSI interfaces that provides state-of-the-art reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) that is easy to administer has long proven difficult. Now, these low-cost devices can be combined with the Solaris ZFS file system to take advantage of file system robustness and ease of administration.
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