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What Makes A Good SAN?
Photon Ghoul asks: "I'm currently researching storage options for my company. We will be choosing a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or SAN (Storage Area Network) solution and are looking at different vendors, including Sun and Network Appliance (but NOT EMC). It must be used in a heterogeneous environment (NT, Sun and Linux), have HA, and easily scaled. I was wondering if readers of Slashdot have had any experience with NAS or SAN vendors. Who should I look at and who should I stay away from? What criteria should I be looking at?" We've talked about SAN Solutions before and there was also a question on the comparisons between SAN and NAS which wasn't well responded to, but had some good information nonetheless. Has the the SAN/NAS landscape changed much since these were asked?
NetApp has a very extensive and well documented knowledge base, which made me feel very comfortable when looking for IIS integration solutions. Specifically, I wanted to use a NetApp filer to centrally house website content, pulled by redundant IIS installations.
My experience with many other vendors has been "aw sure, you can do that", and most of them are talking out of their sales-ass. This usually comes after scouring usenet and the like for examples of products as deployed by others. In my case, NetApp had a full, extremely well documented white paper on NetApp integration with IIS, which was the ultimate selling point. It nicely complemented the fact that the hardware is bulletproof, works on anything, and completely replaces the need for serious future investment in individual server storage.
All you've said is that you're looking at SANs and NAS devices. But what's it going to be used for? This is important.
As for HA, it's rather common these days. NetApp does seem to have a good solution.
And why not EMC? Cost? They've got lower end stuff: http://www.emc.com/products/systems/clariion.jsp. We've got two Clariion's coming next week. They'll be point to point SAN, though.
You might look at the IP4700 as a NAS device. I prefer their HA solution.
In the end, I've been looking at this exact thing for about four months now. Got any questions? Ask. I've spent a lot of time with bot EMC and NetApp.
MTIC has an awesome product and support crew. I've seen the inside of their plant. The stock is in the toilet but ... so is just about everything else!
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The only grief I've ever had with them is integration into a backup scheme, and most of that was due to legacy mainframe-style backup equipment needing to used.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
**Sigh**
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This dead horse may have been flogged already, but here goes again...
Although the line separating SAN's and NAS is starting to blur in some places, the difference is probably best shown by where (in the IO path) the network lies.
In a SAN, the network is placed between raw block-addressed storage devices and the host/filesystem. The networking medium here is generally something that has its genesis in internal host bus technology (fibre channel, infiniband, etc), and the storage devices (large RAID arrays, tape libraries, etc) tend to behave just like the HD or CD burner out on your home machine's SCSI bus (SCSI is actually the language most of these fibre channel storage devices speak). The filesystem is the business of attached servers, _NOT_ exposed within the SAN.
NAS devices, on the other hand, place the network in front of the filesystem. In other words, a NAS box like NetApp's Filer series will actually have a filesystem on it. The networking medium here is often Ethernet (Gbit or otherwise), and hosts connect to the storage devices directly via file-level protocols (NFS, SMB, CIFS, etc).
So the filesystem is a component of a NAS device, but is _NOT_ a concern for a traditional SAN implementation.
As for multiple hosts accessing the same data, as you have mentioned, this is certainly within the capability of the networked filesystem onboard your NAS device. In the case of a SAN, although it will generally be possible to make logical volumes accessible to multiple hosts this is not usually usefull (remember, the filesystem is a construct of the host, not the disk itself!).
I tried an Ask /., but alas, I was rejected. Please help!
I'd like to take some old hard drives I have and save all the data on them (rawread?) including MBR etc. I'd like to be able to recover files later, possibly on a different drive. And I'd like to compress those raw files as much as possible without using straight compression - I don't want to be vulnerable to a single bit corrupting an archive. I plan on burning the compressed files to CDR..
TIA
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I spent almost a year trying to put together a plan for a 7TB storage area network that would be able to play nicely with Alpha/Tru64, HP-UX, Sun, Irix, NT & Linux. I also wanted to hook up that massive fiber channel ATL-P3000 DLT tape library into the SAN fabric as well. The eventual goal was direct backups to tape via the SAN fabric.
.02 in as recommending NetApp over most other NAS vendors. Be carefull of scaling and backup issues though.
We ended up going with five 16 port Brocade Silkworm II switches meshed together. The RAID was Compaq StorageWorks HSZ80 controllers with a mix of their older form factor drives and their new universal drives/chassis.
All and all I've been happy with Storageworks disks and controllers over the years. They are not the cheapest or the first to market with the cutting edge technology but when they do come to market the stuff just plain works.
For people who are considering doing tricky SAN topologies in environments where there are more than one operating system and fiber channel host adaptor type I would strongly recommend at least evaluating the Storageworks product line. They really shine when you have lots of different systems that have to play nicely on the switched fabric.
Building a SAN in a homogenous computing shop is easy. Building one that will interoperate with lots of different systems requires much more work & initial planning.
If you go with NAS instead of SAN I'll also throw my