[CentOS] using Linux as a front-end controller for a SAN?

Rudi Ahlers Rudi at SoftDux.com
Tue Oct 12 18:14:45 UTC 2010


On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:07 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
>  On 10/12/10 10:39 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I hope someone can shed some light on this for me. Has anyone tried,
>> or have experience with, setting up a Linux server to manage a few NAS
>> devices and thus make them all visible to the clients as one large
>> SAN?
>>
>> Basically, I'm thinking it would be a good idea to combine the current
>> NAS's we have into one large system (typically a SAN?) and then let
>> the clients all connect to one server (for authentication, LUN
>> control, etc), but then when they need to access their drives /
>> devices / LUN's, they get redirected to the specific server directly.
>> I'm also thinking it could be a good way to say some IP addresses,
>> i.e. instead of giving each NAS a public IP, they could all have
>> private IP's and then everyone just connects to the public IP if
>> needed. The servers which will access the NAS's will be on the same
>> physical LAN and will also be on the same private IP subnet to make it
>> easier.
>>
>> Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
>
>
> how do you plan to implement redundancy on this system?   there's a
> -huge- single point of failure in the middle of what you're talking about.
>

True, but then one could setup a HA server for the management server.
And probably some load balancer(s) to cater for high availability.



>
> would this be SAN storage (eg, block storage, like ISCSI, FC) or would
> it be NAS storage (file storage like NFS, SMB/CIFS) ?
>

both? Many NAS devices offer both iSCSI & NFS / SMB / CIFS.


Ideally, I want to setup a scalable SAN, with reliability in mind on a
RAID 6 / RAID10 concept, but need each client to only connect to the
relevant server where his data is stored.

-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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