Filers using LB's in the datacenter - anyone?

[scottsee]

Are any of you guys using load ballancers for NFS/SMB storage in your datacenters? Especially for BC/DR compliance?

I'm looking at a couple of new NetAPP 8040's one for both sites, but their MetroCluster licensing more than I need, and though it would be cool to have NAS locksteping tech on the filers for HA across a stretched layer-2 fabric the application support for attached systems don't have a RTO that warrants the investment..

NetApp guys said we should look into put these things behind our internal syn-paired F5's and use a VIP for our SMB/NFS shares.. Just like you would with normal traffic.. It opened a larger discussion about failover scripting, shorten recovery objectives, etc.

Anyone doing this with their filers?

[deanwebb]

Yep, we got load balancers, but the storage team runs them. When people call me, I just prove that it's not the firewall, IPS, or the proxy, then blame the load balancers, the WAN accelerators, and the link balancers.