I have two servers that I plan to use for storage. Each of them has a few SATA disks directly attached. I want the storage to be available even if one of the storage servers is down (preferably the clients wouldn't even notice that the fail-over, although I'm not sure if this is possible). The clients may access the storage via NFS and samba, but this is not a must; I could use something else if needed.

I found this guide, Installing and Configuring Openfiler with DRBD and Heartbeat, which apparently does the thing I want. It relies on three components, Openfiler, DRBD, and Heartbeat, and all three of them need to be configured separately. I'm wondering are there simpler solutions?

Is using DRBD+Heartbeat the best practice for a situation like mine? I'm also interested to know if there are alternatives that don't depend on DRBD.