On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Beginner wrote:
Hi All, 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. Without being too open-ended, I want to get some idea of what Linux-based solution I could use. All the manufacturers I talked to had no idea about how to manage and share their products unless they were Windows based even though they claim to support Linux. 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. However I think that there is more to it than that and I could use some help understanding how it all hangs together and what (Linux) options there are. If there servers are to see the storage as block devices I imagine there is some proprierty software needed for the OS's. Currently I use FC4 on my servers and the are about 40 Windows users that need to access the data as well. Any thoughts or advice is much appreciated. Thanx, Dp.
With a FC4 setup, you may want to look at Red Hat Cluster Suite / GFSJ. GFS allows for parallel access to filesystems, and the cluster suite provides a nice management interface and failover. A nice plus is that it's open source, the code is available from sources.redhat.com, and at least the GFS modules are included in recent FC releases. I'm not sure whether there are stock rpms for the cluster management stuff, but again, they're not at all difficult to build.
-bz -- Brett Zimmerman zim@xxxxxxxxxxxx (405)826-5104 - 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
