[Gllug] Linux SANs (was: Maintaining music libraries in various formats)

[Hari Sekhon]

Walter Stanish wrote:
> ...does anyone have experience building large SANs for use with Linux / FreeBSD?
>
> I've been investigating a bunch of SAN solutions recently, apparently Linux falls down in this area right now vs. Sun's ZFS.  ZFS is barred from Linux kernel implementation due to licensing issues, and the current FUSE implementation in user-space is supposed to perform poorly.  Due to the lack of obvious solutions, we're now considering Nexenta, which seems to be OpenSolaris' native ZFS implementation wrapped with a (very, very good) Linux-based management layer.
>
> We're looking at a few hundred TB... if anyone has experience on this scale I'd love to get in touch.  The main requirement is reliability + online growth, raw bandwidth is secondary.
>   
Can I ask why you are looking to build a SAN? Why not just buy one from 
one of the many good vendors out there which will probably be better and 
more reliable/scalable eg you can buy them with dual controllers for 
redundancy etc.

How is it going to be a "SAN" if it's got ZFS on it? Don't you mean a 
"Nas" then?

You could buy a server with a couple of disk shelves on external scsi 
connectors if you really wanted... not sure how scalable this solution 
would be from a hardware point of view compared to a vendor supplied one 
though.

Nexenta Core isn't bad, but you need to know the solaris and zfs 
management stuff on the command line as there are no other management 
tools with it, they want you to buy the pro version for that.

-h

-- 
Hari Sekhon
http://www.linkedin.com/in/harisekhon

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