[Gllug] SANs

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 10:28:46AM +0100, Steve Sims wrote:
> The brief story is that I work for an on-line music store, and  
> inevitably we have some big storage requirements.  Right now we've  
> got a 2.5TB RAID array attached to a Linux server as our primary  
> storage, but we're fast approaching our storage limit so an upgrade  
> is in order.  This array is maxed out and can't be expanded, so it  
> means a new box.
> 
> Getting another Linux box with a bigger RAID array would be one way  
> to go from here.  A SAN though would seem to make more sense, since  
> we could keep our storage unified and get an infrastructure that is  
> more easily scaled up.

I'd suggest going for a cluster filesystem such as GFS. You can 
either have your clients running GFS & directly attached to the storage,
or have a pool o GFS servers each exporting the volume as NFS. The
latter avoids the expense of FC adapters in every client, and still lets you 
scale up  IO bandwidth to max out your SAN without being bottlenecked
on the network bandwidth.

For further info, check out this series of articles:

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/gfs_nfs/
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/009jul05/features/gfs_overview
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/009jul05/features/gfs_practices/
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/009jul05/features/cluster/
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/009jul05/features/lvm2/

NB, I work for Red Hat hence my suggesting GFS  - there are other
cluster filesystems available, but I don'tknow enough to talk about
them with authority - the principles are much the same though.

Regards,
Dan.

-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
|=-       Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-           Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20050929/a5710699/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug