[CentOS] using Linux as a NAS / SAN device

Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> 
> Something else I just realized, dedicated NAS devices can rebuild the
> RAID system on the fly, and offer online RAID migration and expansion,
> load balance, and failover - how would one do these with Linux?

Look at the mdadm tools for raid.  Rebuilding on the fly is no problem 
if your hardware supports hot-swap.  Expanding is more complicated and 
if you mange it, you then have to separately grow the filesystem into 
the new space.  LVM might be more useful for migration/expansion.  If 
you need mirroring/failover between two systems, look at DRBD and heartbeat.

I believe openfiler uses the native linux tools with a management 
wrapper to integrate the steps - where nexentastor uses opensolaris/zfs 
where the concepts are integrated directly.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com