cPanel web servers mounting home partition to a NAS or SAN

Question

I currently have 2 cPanel web servers that are little 1RU dual cpu quad core xeons. They have a lot of resources for processing and handling web requests, and never exceed more than 10% cpu usage. They also have plenty of RAM.

The problem is though that they both have RAID 1 160Gb SAS hard disk drives in them that are 75% full, and growing by the day. I didnt think that the amount of disk usage would be so high, but due to the nature of the sites hosted, this has become an issue.

The easy fix would be just to upgrade the hard drives to something bigger (probably not of the SAS variety), but I am thinking of keeping the current machines as "processing servers" and buying a central "storage server" with about 12TB of storage. The /home/ partition on each of the 1RU servers would be mounted to a NAS or SAN point on this central storage server.

My questions are:
- Has anyone got a cPanel setup where they mount /home/ to a NAS or SAN elsewhere? If so, can you provide details as to what you did and how it went :)
- Any recommendations on networking? Is gigabit ethernet enough? Is TCP/IP going to be a noticable performance problem? Anyone used a TOE key?
- Anyone benchmarked or had any performance issues with SAN over NAS?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Scott

Answer 1

Yes, gigabit is enough. Your users have a dsl connection, so they will no see any difference.

You could make a NFS share on your cpanel server, and mount is as /home2. When, you can change the directory in whm, where new users are installed to /home2. Old users will still use the local /home storage, but new users would use /home2. You can også desire to move all to /home2 if you like.

I have created the /backup-directory on my cpanel server to a nfs share. And I can get a speed round 40MB/s to a Qnap NAS over local gigabit connection.