Re: SAN for beginners

[urgrue <urgrue@bulbous.org>]

> 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).