iSCSI failover with bonding (802.3ad) and multiple failover?

[Robotbeat]

Okay, I have two important questions:
The first and probably more important is whether I can bond two interfaces on both the source and destination box going to the switch when I am using iSCSI failover (so there are four ports going to the switch from the DSS boxes, two from each box). I suppose I could try this myself, but I the equipment is at the customer's site.

The second is less important but slightly more complicated. Can there be two failover connections? What I mean is that each box would act as both a source and a destination. Suppose I have two volumes on each server (server A and server B): volume A1, volume A2, volume B1, and volume B2. A1 and B1 are identical in size, as are A2 and B2. A1 is set a source volume (with B1 as its destination), and B2 is a source volume (A2 is set as its destination volume). In this way, you have a sort of pseudo-active-active configuration going on. This is basically how one of our customers already is set up with their DSS. We're wondering if the same thing could work with auto-failover.

And a third, not very important question:
What about auto-failover of NAS volumes? Perhaps it would only be completely transparent for certain protocols (like NFS) without losing the connection momentarily, but is this in the pipeline?

[To-M]

Okay, I have two important questions:
The first and probably more important is whether I can bond two interfaces on both the source and destination box going to the switch when I am using iSCSI failover (so there are four ports going to the switch from the DSS boxes, two from each box). I suppose I could try this myself, but I the equipment is at the customer's site.

Bonding is recommended for both systems with regards to the volume replication. You can bond the Virtual IP Address as well and is a good idea but some do not have 4 or more nic's.

Below is the link for the recommendations for Failover - select the 5th one down from the list.

http://www.open-e.com/library/product-presentations/


Only one can be the Primary or Active server for Volumes, so you can't mix them with the Failover option but you can mix them for manual failover.

Auto-failover of NAS volumes is EXTREMLY complicated and can be very expensive even our competitors charge big time for this feature!!

We have a manual failover for NAS Volumes also with a scheduled task function.

But guess what we are working on having this in 2009!! Please do not ask for an exact date but we are hoping for our developer GODs to ETA in Q2 or Q3 and still will be less expensive then the big guys !