IEEE1394-based Storage Area Network?

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)?"

Comments

Re:Lose the buzzwords

[BitGeek]

You're missing the point: Using firewire you have the high performance of Firewire. Cat5 and you're back into ethernet space and packets.

Firewire supports sustained high bandwidth transfers between multiple drives and multiple computers.

I mean, if you don't need the performance of a SAN, then sure, use Cat5 and you have a fileserver.

But if you're looking for something between FCAL and Ethernet, then Firewire is likely a great midrange choice.