[Gllug] SANs

[Steve Sims]

First up thank you all for your input so far.

On 29 Sep 2005, at 16:41, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> One of the problems with the apple based solution is that you are  
> buying into pretty much dead end technology, something you dont  
> need to face with an Opteron + Linux based solutions ( x8664/linux  
> will proll give you a better bang for the buck anyway ).
>
> Repeating whats already been said, with RHEL + CS-GFS, you get a  
> solid, supported platform from where to build onto ( or CentOS, if  
> you prefer that route, also works fine )

Everyone here seems really keen on GFS, and it does indeed look  
interesting.

There seems to be one big problem though, which is it seems to be a  
Linux only solution.  As I mentioned our main web-facing servers are  
running Mac OS X, and we're likely to get more Mac OS X boxes too.   
These would need to directly connection to the storage - connecting  
via NFS or similar seems inefficient to me.  I also have very little  
time to invest in learning about setting up and managing a SAN, and  
from what I've seen and read GFS might not quite be ready for me yet.

I hear your point about an Apple solution, but the fact that it can  
have Linux clients as well as Mac OS X is to me a major point in its  
favour, as is the comparative ease of set-up and configuration.   
Apple aren't like to disappear any time soon so I don't see the  
single vendor problem as very significant either.  The bang per buck  
equation is indeed interesting, but part of that is the time that I  
can spend on setting things up and learning about them which will  
take me away from other projects.

Thanks again for the input.

Suggestions for other more platform neutral approaches would be most  
welcome.

Steve
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