> I need to add some about 10TB of storage to our infrasturce and went > along to an storage exhibition to find out what was available. The > biggest grey area for me was the filesystem and management. For starters, are you sure you need SAN? SAN is great and wonderful, but it is quite expensive, and I know from experience that the salesmen at storage exhibitions will happily try and sell you on SAN even if alternative (cheaper) solutions (such as NAS or iSCSI) would suffice. > I had been presuming I would install the SAN gateway and the storage > arrays, use LVM for the filesystem and Samba to share the data to > Windows user and install Fibre-Channel cards to the other 3 servers > that need access to the data. As someone already pointed out, the 3 servers wont see the same data as the computers mounting it via samba, not without GFS or something similar. Same with iSCSI. If they do need access to the same data, this is the point where one should asks themselves if NAS might suit you better after all. > If there servers are to > see the storage as block devices I imagine there is some proprierty > software needed for the OS's. The only proprietary software you need is the driver that comes with the 1000 dollar FC card. iSCSI can be done using free software over a normal ethernet card but it eats up a lot of CPU and you wont get very good performance out of it (but its still pretty good). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
