Clustered storage options -- desperately seeking advice

[Mike Mitchell]

Hi all,

I am trying to nail down what equipment I need to be looking for that  
works well for:

1. Storage of online database files (specifically EnterpriseDB) in  
clustered fashion.  I.e. I have two servers accessing the same  
storage simultaneously to facilitate speedy recovery upon primary DB  
server failure.

2. General fileserving to a larger number of servers via NFS or  
something similar (iSCSI perhaps).  This also needs to be redundant/ 
clustered such that one server going down doesn't prevent storage  
access by the other servers.

If I can accomplish both of these things with one storage box that  
would be ideal.  However, a number of questions have come up that I  
don't know the answers to--perhaps someone on this list does?:

1. Would iSCSI connections to a RAID-10 filesystem work well for a  
database that needs to be high-performance transactional processing?   
Or is Fibre/SAS to be preferred for some reason?

2. I don't know much about iSCSI yet--is it suitable (or even  
possible) to connect lots of servers to the same storage unit for  
shared fileserving, or is it preferable to just connect a couple via  
iSCSI as a storage cluster and then NFS to the rest?

3. It seems like all the storage options Dell has are not really  
officially supported via a RedHat storage cluster--is anyone using  
any storage from Dell (or anyone else) in this configuration and has  
some experience to share on its performance, issues, manageability,  
etc.?

Help!  Time is short, thanks...

/mike