On Jul 23, 2009, at 8:33 PM, Clint Dilks clintd@scms.waikato.ac.nz wrote:
Hello Everyone
I work for a University Department that has a high number of Linux Desktop Users. Currently we provide a users home directory via NFS from a file server. Generally it works well for us, but I have been asked to look at our options for expanding the storage we have available.
So I thought one of the first things I had better do is consider are there alternatives to the way we do things now that could be better for us.
My initial research suggests that the only real alternative to NFS in this context is ISCSI or perhaps the combination of ISCSI and GFS.
So I was wondering has anyone on this list in a similar field implement ISCSI for home directories instead of NFS? And if so would you be able to give me some idea of the costs/ benefits of doing this?
ISCSI isn't really suited for this. You would use iSCSI to provide storage to your NFS servers probably from a large storage box like an EMC, 3PAR or such.
You could make your own massive storage server and present the storage in parts via iSCSI to different NFS servers serving different parts of campus.
-Ross