On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 08:04:54AM -0800, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
NAS offers safe concurent access (generally, there might be some NAS devices outthere that do not). NAS device will manage file system internally, and export it over NFS or SMB protocols to the clients.
Such NAS' are a combined host+storage aka "filer." They have many advantages over SAN -- especially in their fail-over and/or load-balancing capabilities.
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Oh, it all depends on the design of the NAS. NetApp does a pretty damn fine job with their designs (long story). But there's many other benefits. But that is a larger discussion.
Hi Bryan,
Please tell. I have to replace our old Sun Enterprise fileserver (solaris8), which does NFS and Samba (homedirectories, projects file space). It will be x86 hardware, but I'm looking for the best filesystem for the job (let's say one terabyte). It has to have quota and ACL support.
I'm doing CentOS on servers these days, but I presume ext3 is not the best choice in this case. Previous postings of yours suggest XFS is the way to go. However, it seems hard to find an enterprise class linux distro with XFS incorporated? And how does a FreeBSD solution compare to linux/ext3 or linux/xfs?
What are the considerations in case of a NAS filer instead of a raid-box connected to hostmachine?
Regards,