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Configuring SANs for high availability

How do we configure a SAN as host storage of combined Win2000, NT, and Novell as a failover or clustered design?

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For high availability, SAN storage can be configured to be accessed by servers with cluster failover capabilities. For example using Microsoft-based operating systems, servers can be configured for failover and SAN storage access using clustering software from Microsoft or third-party independent software vendors (ISV). For Novell Netware environments, you could use the Novell Clustering Services software to enable server failover. There are also clustering and failover solutions for other operating system environments, including Linux, HP HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Sun Solaris.

In addition to server failover, path failover and management of host adapters can be part of a server cluster configurations as well as for standard servers to utilize redundant SAN access paths. Path management software is available from many different vendors for different platforms. While this is an oversimplified list of things to do, your SAN storage will need to be configured to be accessed by the different servers including making sure that any zones are setup properly, LUN masking and mapping is adequately configured, and that failover software recognizes which SAN LUNs and volumes to access along with appropriate restart and adapter path assignments.

This was first published in September 2004

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