High performance architecture with shared storage

[Matt Hobbs]

Hi All,

Hoping that this is the right section for this type of question.

We have a relatively large MySQL environment where we are currently using MySQL Master-Slave replication to achieve our performance requirements. We typically have multiple clusters of 10 hosts, where one is read-write and the others are read-only. We are also very performance sensitive so are currently using FusionIO cards in each host.

We are finding a few challenges with this architecture however, and are looking for other ideas - specifically though we would like to come back to a very high speed shared storage solution that would allow us to have a single copy of the DB, where the master can mount it as read-write and the slaves as read-only.

I understand that by using Clusterware this type of design is possible, however we would prefer to not to use that product as we are okay to use some manual failover processes if need be.

Has anyone ever done anything like this before? I know that MySQL supports mounting as read only, "--innodb-read-only=1", however what other implications are there if using this method compared to their existing Master-Slave configuration? Is it possible to have one as read-write and the others read-only if using this parameter?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts.