Reccomendations for FC-attached storage appliance?

[Danny Howard]

  [NOTE: cross-posting to freebsd-scsi and -questions ... please reply
  direct to me, or followup to just ONE list.  I may post summary after.]

Hello,

I have spent the past few weeks confusing around with different vendors
to find a cool external disk solution that might offer high performance,
and high availability for our production database.  My questio is
two-fold:

1) Would anyone like to share a preferred storage solution?  My dream is
something where I can connect two FC controllers to two FreeBSD servers.
If one controller fails, or if one server fails, I can still mount the
same disks via the redundant server or controller.

It sounds like most solutions have the disks on one controller or the
other, so if a controller fails, the disks are inaccessible until you
swap out the failed controller.  The Applex Xserve RAID comes to mind.

2) Would anyone like to share a preferred HBA?  I am constantly
frustrated by suggested solutions because it seems that every disk
appliance only ever supports one HBA.  For example, the Apple ... only
supports LSI7202XP.  My research has found zero evidence that this is
supported by FreeBSD.  So, if that wont work, I should just run Linux?
Or has someone stress-tested their favorite HBA and found it to be
totally robust in some configuration ... ?

Thanks a bunch!

Sincerely,
-danny

-- 
http://dannyman.toldme.com/