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IEEE1394-based Storage Area Network?

Posted by Cliff on from the light-that-wire-on-fire dept.

Hank asks: "I work for Hewlett-Packard and just recently installed my first SAN at a customer site. It was much fun, I was blown away by the ease of the storage device management and the allocation of storage space across the systems. Being a professional environment, it was high-available, ran over FibreChannel through switched fabric, and cost upwards of US$250k -- not really affordable for most households. Roughly at the same time I started looking at IEEE 1394 cards for some video-editing, and an idea came up: Would it be possible to build a lowcost SAN based on Firewire cards, hubs and devices? How would storage device mgmt look like (the (de-)allocating of LUNs / slices / partitions)? What about support of multiple OS's on the SAN? How about this: would it be possible to create a Linux-based disk-array with an IEEE1394 interface (Old P200, crammed with disks, software RAID, lots of RAM for caching, Firewire interface, looking/acting like a single disk to the outside world, storage device mgmt via web-frontend)?"

5 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. FireCube? by questionlp · · Score: 2, Informative
    I remember seeing a while back that a company had a storage device for Macs that allowed several users attach to the device using FireWire and the supplied software to access the drives in the unit. I can't remember who made it or what it was called... but a Google search can probably bring up a couple of hits.

    I'm not sure if I have seen any PC-oriented FireWire SAN solutions though as FireWire hasn't really been something you would see in a lot of computers until recently.

    I did find a couple when doing a search for "FireWire Network Storage":

    http://www.adept.net.au/1394/nas.shtml
    http://www.networkcomputing.com/1118/1118sp3.html (this is probably what I was thinking of)
    http://www.turnover.com/news/mdm/firenas.html

  2. Re:Lose the buzzwords by rpresser · · Score: 2, Informative

    Um, no. You've just described NAS - Network Attached Storage. Shared storage from NAS devices appears as NFS (or Samba, Mac, or whatever) and you can mount it on any client.

    A SAN - Storage Area Network - is when you have lots of RAID storage being shared by several servers. Each server believes it is directly attached to a physical disk, when actually it's just getting one or more slices of the pooled RAID units.

  3. You haven't been very clear, but you can do both by Gruturo · · Score: 3, Informative

    As others already pointed out, you are confusing the NAS and SAN concepts (but is it your fault? look at stuff like EMC Celerra HighRoad and then you'll be confused :-) )

    Anyway,
    Want to exploit 1394 (heck, we can finally call it Firewire!) to mount a disk? You just need a 1394 enclosure for your regular IDE disks. Example.

    Want to exploit 1394 to access a network share via SMB/NFS? You can, with Ip-over-1394 (works on Apple, Linux, Win ME and XP. Not on 2000).
    You just load the correct modules and it shows up like a network interface.

    Just my 0.02.

    I am not associated with the linked shop, I just happen to be a happy customer of theirs. Their Fire-I webcam is really cool (640x480x30fps) and it's amazing how well it can focus on extremely near objects, it's almost a microscope. I put it in contact with the screen and was able to focus on single pixels.... now that's a nice way to really study ClearType :-)

    --

    Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
  4. Don't use firewire. by stienman · · Score: 3, Informative

    The upcoming serial ATA standard will give you better performance at a lower cost. A firewire drive is large, expensive, and consumes slightly more power. All you gain over current IDE technology is hot swap, and that will be solved with serial ATA.

    But what you are really after are the tools to manage such a beast. The physical implementation shouldn't matter to the developers - all the software needs to know is that storage exists that the user needs to use, and how to read from and write to said storage. It shouldn't matter whether it's an IDE drive, a friewire, a usb, a scsi, a 1000 tape library, or any combination of storage devices which, IMHO, will be a great differentiating feature from commercial packages.

    Yes, the free SAN package handles your old room size tape robot as well as this rack of serial ATA drives, and will treat them accordingly - near line storage in the tapes (semi archive), on line storage in the HD, and off line (off site) over the WAN link to the storage cluster at your other shop. If you need an extra terabyte just go to officemax and plug in a firewire drive until the tech comes out and adds more serial ata devices to your drive chain.

    Of course, you could buy the SAN package available from x, or y, but you'll pay dearly for it, and you can't add storage to it yourself. Oh, and it only works with their hardware.

    -Adam

  5. terminology, technology by rakerman · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ok, it's not clear from your posting exactly what you want.

    Do you want NAS?
    That's Network Attached Storage. Currently almost entirely Ethernet based. You get a box with some disks and software, and it sits on the Ether looking like a fileserver, maybe just a CIFS server for Windows boxes, more likely both CIFS and NFS to support Windows and UNIX.

    Do you want a SAN?
    That's a Storage Area Network.
    A bunch of disk boxes connected together with a switched Fibre Channel network. Servers connect by Fibre Channel directly into the network.

    Do you want a NAShead on a SAN?
    A NAS device acts as a front-end to the SAN, so you have an Ethernet file-sharing frontend onto a Fibre Channel storage network backend.

    The problem with implementing any of these is they're about more than a transport medium. A NAS is more than Ethernet. A SAN is more than Fibre Channel. Those media mostly just pump the data around. It's a ton of software that handles the sharing of files.

    So sure, you can string a bunch of disks and CD burners and whatnot together with FireWire. No problem. I do it myself. "FireWire" disks are almost entirely just an enclosure with a normal ATA disk inside and an ATA-to-FireWire bridge. Adds a small cost onto the price of a regular IDE drive, that's it. You can buy the enclosures yourself and do it quite cheaply.

    However, the operating systems that you connect to the FireWire are going to have no freaking idea about filesharing. If you try to connect more than one host, it won't know what to do.

    What you need is FireWire ***PLUS*** filesharing software.

    Unibrain makes something they call FireNAS

    http://www.unibrain.com/home/

    That's about the closest thing in existence to what you describe.

    If you're wanting to use IP-over-1394 (RFC 2734), be aware that Microsoft's stack is the main working one. The Linux stack is in beta and Apple has no plans to implement IP-over-FireWire at all.

    You can find more info on IEEE-1394 at

    http://www.cs.dal.ca/~akerman/gradproject/projec t- links.html#IEEE1394
    Also check out the Linux 1394 project

    http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/