what is the 2023 (NVME) solution to highly available storage instead of SAS dual port?

[aep]

The most common solution to deal with "highly available" (meaning two host, one is ok to fail and the alive one takes the drives) storage appears to be using SAS drives with dual ports.

However, SAS is kind of dead? SAS SSDs cost a lot more than NVME, are slower than NVME and i cant even find simple enclosures.
Most big vendors want to sell you a subscription for their cluster management thing, which is just way out there in terms of pricing.

I considered doing a software solution like ceph, but software is painfully slow and really just too much hassle for something as trivial as a redundant file server in a single semi-professional rack.

What is everyone else doing? If its still SAS, what kind of enclosures are you using and what SSDs?
Are nvme switches a thing where you can access an nvme drive from multiple hosts?
Or is there a solution to share SATA drives? (dirt cheap)

 

[BlueFox]

Dual port NVMe drives have been around since 2016: https://www.servethehome.com/new-dual-port-nvme-ssds-intel-dc-d3700-dc-d3600/

 

[i386]

This post sounds more like a "want" than a "need" for high availability ._.

sas [...] are slower than NVME

Sas4 has lower latency (24GBit/s) than pcie 4.0 (16GBit/s) ssds, but pcie ssds combine 4 (* 16GBit/s) lanes for more total throughput

i cant even find simple enclosures.

Until now most nvme storage stuff are full servers (and not jbod style). It might change with cxl and newer pcie versions.
There are pcie "extension" chassis but they are for pcie add on cards (gpus, accelerators, fpga etc.)

Are nvme switches a thing where you can access an nvme drive from multiple hosts?

there are pcie switches and devices that can be shared with multiple hosts but I've never seen it being used for ssds by multiple hosts.

 

[aep]

actually i meant i cant even find SAS enclosures. The ones i've seen are either for large spiny drives or part of a commercial clustering solution.
plus of course, the fact that dual port SAS SSDs are insanely expensive versus reasonably priced datacenter nvmes, or dirt cheap "nas" sata drives

 

[i386]

Now I'm confused
Do you mean they are not available or do you mean you don't have product numbers/skus etc?

 

[aep]

oh i should maybe have clarified that i have never built a solution like this, so i dont know which parts you'd use.
the parts i found other people use (for example Home ) are EOL or out of budget and mostly for rust spinners, not SSDs

 

[i386]

"High availability" is always expensive because everything has to be redundant

What you're looking for are dual expander jbods (sometimes also called "disk shelves").
There are many different vendors with 2.5" and 3.5" versions (eg supermicro:Chassis | Supermicro)

 

[ano]

pretty much impossible to find an enclosure/system for dual path nvme