Questions about HA

Hi,
i'm searching for an iscsi Solution and evaluating (for now by reading posts and documentation) Open-e DSS.

My architetcure :
Two nodes cluster with Novell OES for edirectory and i want to clusterize Groupwise with hearbeat or Novell Cluster Services. Groupwise might be installed on shared storage.

These two nodes are connected to two gigabit switches to provide network HA with multipathing.
Is DSS supporting multipathing and how ?

About replication :
will some kind of ip take-over feature be implemented ?
I understand that for now there is no mirroring between two DSS servers but data replication with at least 1 minute latency ?
Is that replication block mode ?
If the first DSS fails i have to manually connect my swithes to the second DSS ?
What about transactionnal program or openfiles concern ?

About snapshot :
Performance of restoration/recovery

Who has a good architecture scheme for me ? :)

Thanks for reply and sorry for my english
Thierry

Currently we have manual failover and are working on Auto failover.
We do not have support for Novell, so I would not be able to provide information on this subject.

We have MPIO for FC HBA's. Bonding for 1GB and 10GB NIC's.
iSCSI Volume Replication is synchronous and NAS Data Replication is synchronous and asynchronous. Block IO for iSCSI/NAS in latest version.

Snapshot performance can be tested with the Demo-CD for you environment to gain real world numbers, but this is usually not an issue if more then 10 are concurrently running at the same time.

First thanks for answers.

I may have not well understood certain parts...:o
How did bonding feet into scheme ? i think not for multipathing ?
MPIO for FC is for SAN behind open-e but for iscsi server client (initiator) is there a sort of multipath-tools available ?
For future (i hope) auto-failover how will you achieve cable connection ?

Thanks a lot

In previous statement you had mentioned ""network HA with multipathing.
Is DSS supporting multipathing and how ?""

So MPIO (for our product) is not with Bonding of NIC's but on FC HBA's and this is done without configuration.

You most likely meant Teaming or Bonding for NIC's, example would be Balance RR or 802.3ad.

If you email me at todd.maxwell@open-e.com I will send you a how to from MS Multipath.

Concerning specifics for our future release of auto-failover connectivity this is still in development, so no information as of yet.