Two Servers Connecting To XRaid

[macmanjc]

While not an XSan-specific question, this seems to be the forum where all of the XRaid and Fibre Channel experts are located, so I am hoping that someone out there will know the answer to my question regarding backup.

I am setting up a new Intel XServe and XServe RAID for a client which I am going to hook up to a Q-Logic SANBox Express 1403 switch. At this point only the left side of the RAID is going to be populated with 4x250GB Apple Drive Modules + 1 hot spare. The new XServe is going to be handling the file sharing of all of my client’s job files over AFP and SMB to the clients on the Ethernet network.

My plan is to take his existing G5 XServe and set it up as a backup server; I am going to connect several external FireWire 800 drives and setup multiple backup roatations so that he will have local and off-site backups of his data. In order to backup the large quantity of data efficiently I was planning to add a FC card to the G5 XServe and hook that into the Q-Logic switch, the thought being that it would be much faster to backup to the FireWire drives if the data was coming over FC from the XRaid vs. over Ethernet.

However, after doing much research over the last several days, I am starting to wonder if this is going to work. Specifically, it seems that I am going to run into problems having two XServes connected to the same XRaid, even if I setup the permissions for the Backup server to be Read-Only. Someone else indicated in a post elsewhere on the forums that he had a similar setup, and it worked fine, except that the machine that was setup as Read-Only had trouble with refreshing the file structure on the RAID, and wouldn’t see any files that had been created after the Read-Only volume was mounted.

So, the question is: am I going to run into problems with my proposed setup? And, has anyone else seen the type of problem described in relation to Read-Only volumes?

Any help that anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.
-John

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