[clug-talk] Storage Area Networks - Network attached Storage Solutions?

[Kevin Anderson]

On Friday 03 December 2004 09:47, "J. Rafael Sánchez" wrote:
> I thank you all for your comments. If I were to buy a couple of external
> firewire/sata/ide/raid cases with around 2TB capacity each, and attach
> them to one or two of my existing [fastest] servers, would I be getting
> a comparable solution?

Personally, if I was setting up a situation where several servers depended on 
1 set of disks, I would want an OS that doesn't do anything except serve up 
those disks.  So I'd connect the array to a separate box with nothing really 
running except the NFS Server.  That would greatly reduce the liklihood of 
anything crashing.

>
> Also, we produce, not only lot's of data, but files that have started to
> reach beyond the 2Gb threshold, an issued which I'm already having some
> challenges with. It becomes a challenge to move them around. Would you
> care to comment on that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

I'm a huge fan of Reiser.  That's the direction I'd go in.

> Has anyone had to deal with a similar situation and, if I may ask, how
> do you deal with it? I recently put a 64bit system together... and
> installed FC3 on it...I've had some problems with it already, but that's
> another complete different topic of discussion...

If you're running a production system, I wouldn't do it on a semi-supported 
distro.  This isn't really meant as a dig, but the truth is that FC is there 
to get people started using Red Hat, and you're in Red Hat territory, not 
FC's.  I suspect you'd see alot of support messages which might indicate 
something along those lines from a quasi-commercial distro.  This is based on 
support given for the free version of smoothwall.

In my first paragraph, I suggested an NFS server.  I stand by that comment, 
but I'm not certain on the file size limits that NFS would handle.  So test 
that before listening to me.  :)  Unless someone else can comment.

Also note that there can be problems beyond the ones in the FS.  You may find 
that things like zip will die on files beyond the 2TB size range.

Kev.