[Gllug] SANs

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 05:44:00PM +0100, Steve Sims wrote:
> 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.  

Yes, GFS is Linux only, so to provide storage to a diverse set of
client platforms, one would typically have a handful of servers 
connected to the SAN (or regular SCSI/ATA storage if you so desire)
running GFS, and then export the volumes via NFS or SAMBA. While you'd
have more latency than if your clients all connected straight to the
SAN, you'd save a tonne of money in not buying FC cards for 10's of
servers. Whether the inefficiency is a big problem, depends on whether
the client application's care about latency, or bandwidth.

>                                           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.

Setting up & running a clustered filesystem &/ SAN is certainly
not for the faint hearted ; a lot more complex than a managing
a regular NFS file server. 

Dan.
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