Yes, we have just started looking at SAN's and got sticker shock big time with the proprietary vendors. Then I started digging into what SAN would provide, and my first thought was - It's just a dedicated data network - a private NFS/XFS for the servers to use. I'm sure the SAN vendors will claim they add value through robustness and failover - but they also add that little glitch of proprietary implementation that attempts to lock you into their product line. An earlier article in Network Computing - may last fall, quoted a large university or governemnt technologist (maybe NASA) - he was not impressed by the capabilities of the vendor solutions over the private data network approach. He went so far as to say that even the standards work on SANs was not going to be very useful in the near term of two or three years after it's finished. Plan 9 from Lucent/Bell Labs (whatever) is looking better all the time - thin clients, compute server, data servers, mobility, robustness, and an excellent pedigree. Of course I also like the idea of Beowulf + XFS-based-SAN + GbitEnet - no wonder IBM is hot on Linux.
Most DBs that support a remote admin tool can be administered from any client OS. As noted Sybase on Linux or HP/UX, etc. can be administered from the Windows based tool. I have found that its really more important what version of the tool and DB are involved, versus the OS on client and server. There are also several third party tools like Platinum's Desktop DBA that can support multiple DBs on the backend, and on multiple platforms. You usually just have to run a SQL script on the backend that installs some stored procedures to facilitate the front end tool.
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Yes, we have just started looking at SAN's and got sticker shock big time with the proprietary vendors. Then I started digging into what SAN would provide, and my first thought was - It's just a dedicated data network - a private NFS/XFS for the servers to use. I'm sure the SAN vendors will claim they add value through robustness and failover - but they also add that little glitch of proprietary implementation that attempts to lock you into their product line. An earlier article in Network Computing - may last fall, quoted a large university or governemnt technologist (maybe NASA) - he was not impressed by the capabilities of the vendor solutions over the private data network approach. He went so far as to say that even the standards work on SANs was not going to be very useful in the near term of two or three years after it's finished. Plan 9 from Lucent/Bell Labs (whatever) is looking better all the time - thin clients, compute server, data servers, mobility, robustness, and an excellent pedigree. Of course I also like the idea of Beowulf + XFS-based-SAN + GbitEnet - no wonder IBM is hot on Linux.
Most DBs that support a remote admin tool can be administered from any client OS. As noted Sybase on Linux or HP/UX, etc. can be administered from the Windows based tool. I have found that its really more important what version of the tool and DB are involved, versus the OS on client and server. There are also several third party tools like Platinum's Desktop DBA that can support multiple DBs on the backend, and on multiple platforms. You usually just have to run a SQL script on the backend that installs some stored procedures to facilitate the front end tool.