Building a small server setup - need storage and reduncy - NAS or SAN? [closed]

Question

I want to build a small server setup. With 2 load balancers, and at first 2 webservers. I need a setup where both webservers would be able to upload and download files from a common storage solution.

What would best suit my needs ? NAS or SAN ? My webservers should be able to, via a webinterface that i build in php/mysql, upload/download files from the shared storage solution.

Currently i have looked at a NAS from synology: http://www.synology.dk/products/product.php?product_name=RS812&lang=dan

Any advice i highly appreciated.

Answer 1

SAN usually means a very large infrastructure with FiberChannel (or FCOE) and is usually expensive in comparison to the SAN. A NAS should be enough, look for a link aggregation to have a large bandwidth between servers

Answer 2

What are you trying to achieve? How important is uptime? What are your constraints (e.g. budget?)

Both NAS and SAN give you a single point of failure (although high end SANs can be set up to reduce the likelihood of the entire SAN failing). Using a shared filesystem has a really bad impact on performance. I would strongly recommend using a replicated cluster filesystem like AFS or Hadoop HDFS

BTW: a SAN need not be expensive - see this (but note that an iSCSI SAN can be built for approx the same price as an ATAoE SAN) and this