I am looking for ways to create some kind of file replication without losing too much performance on file operations. A real RAID is not an option due to non-technical constraints.
As far as I understand, DRBD tries to act like a real RAID1, distributing the changes immediately. From what I read, this only makes sense, if the servers are really close to eachother (same rack). However, I can live with a certain lag (eg. 15-30 minutes) between the replication of the filesystem and a partial loss of data in case of HD failure.
Can you point me into some direction? Is there a non-realtime file replication? Or would I be better of simply calling rsync over and over again? Are there any benchmarks on comparing DRBD with different latencies with Software-RAID systems.
Best Answer
Possibly GlusterFS will be a solution. http://www.gluster.org/
In my experience it's capable of coping with slow networks well enough.