This section covers the following:
An ISP has a portal providing users with disk space to store their data at a central location for continuous access. The users pay for the service, so they expect the ISP to provide round-the-clock service, because the users across the globe expect access to their data anytime. The ISP can deploy this iFolder solution to ensure high availability and for faster access. The ISP must deploy the setup behind a Fibre Channel SAN with 1:1 server node backup for each iFolder server. This enables the setup to perform a faster failover if a particular node is going down for maintenance or for some other reason.
High performance is delivered by using Fibre Channel and the failover is not noticeable. Also, because the data store is faster, the simultaneous user data transfer is high compared to other deployments because the main usage of this setup is to store and share data.
Backup of user data is a major task for administrators, especially for organizations that work around the clock, because the administrators do not get a window of time for backing up user data. iFolder deployment provides an almost real-time backup solution, where the user data is backed up and the delta is synchronized with a latency of five minutes. At any given point, if a failure occurs, the user data is available with a risk of losing only the last five minutes of data.
Using this deployment, you can formulate a backup strategy where the administrator does not need to find time to perform a backup, and can recover data in real time. This deployment employs Novell Cluster Services and a high speed SAN with a Fibre Channel controller to provide good response time for the data that is synchronized.