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