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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)?"

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Lose the buzzwords by billcopc · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    If you're setting up a single PC with lots of storage, then it's not a "storage area network", it's just a "plain old file server". The difference between the two is that SAN sounds more professional to PHB types, and it is generally seen as a turn-key solution for storage. You just plug in some Cat-5 and give it a password, TADA. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're just linux boxen with custom software for storage management. That's the big Plus of SAN devices : easy to install and use. You don't need a linux admin to setup a Maxtor MaxAttach (sp?) rig, you just need any old NT/Novell twit who at least knows how many megs are in a gig.

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
  2. I did something similar by dasunt · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    My "fileserver" (also DHCP server) is a Pentium 166 with 32 megs memory and an old 10 mbit 3com509b card. Basically, $25 on ebay. A floppy drive was used to install linux (net install of Debian), then removed. There is no cd drive, and no video card in the machine. A 2 gig HDD is used for booting, and for most of the system files, and an 80 gig HDD is used for storage. (It was big at the time).

    Running Samba, I can saturate my 10 mbit network with the machine. With tests done on a 100 mbit network, I reach about 30% use. However, the bottleneck is not the CPU or memory, it seems to be the onboard IDE. With a PCI ATA 100 card, performance should go up.

    All in all, its a nice machine. Since its a desktop, it fits nicely under the printer it shares. An SSH server allows me to securely log in, change any system settings, and do updates. Its quiet, cheap, and effective. With only a power cable, an ethernet cable, and the printer cable, its neat. And did I mention upgradeable?

    A hardware RAID-IDE card should cost me about $250. [Haven't tried software RAID in a P166 and I have no urge too.] That shouldn't put any load on the CPU, and would provide redundancy. Getty on a serial port would be nice as well. If I want to, I can also swap the drive for something bigger without worry about the system supporting it. With ext3, it handles power outages well.

    It works.