Rudi Ahlers schrieb: > > Hi Rainer, > > I honestly don't want to spend a lot of cash on a proprietary system > like NetApp and actually want to use a lot of old tower machines (i.e. > limited space for hard drives, and no redundancy, slower CPU's, etc) > we already have. CentOS is my preferred OS of choice, and I don't know > Solaris, at all. I could probably give it a go, but not right now. > > The setup I'm hoping to achieve is as follows: > We develop a lot of PHP + MySQL based intranet and internet > applications, so the main server currently runs Apache + PHP + MySQL + > Zend, etc. > > Some of the applications require large volumes of data which is > currently saved on the sambas server. This makes it easy, as any one > on the LAN can add / remove data to the SMB server, and the PHP app > can also access it. But I still have a problem, that if the storage > runs out, and I add another box to the network, then it's a different > server with a new storage point - not ideal. > That means you either need a bigger central server or something like pNFS or Lustre. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system) The later also owned by SUN, now. The stuff you want is really mainly found in gear provided by vendors that supply storage for HPC-clusters... > So, trying to use existing hardware, and preferably CentOS (I would > prefer not to reinstall the server right now), what else (if iSCSI > isn't right) would I rather use,if I want to consolidate the storage > of a few Linux machines, and export it over the LAN to various > workstations? > > > I'm not sure what the status of pNFS is in Linux (given the fact that NFS on Linux has only relatively recently "matured"). cheers, Rainer