Rudi Ahlers wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking at using Linux as a NAS / SAN device, and would like some > input from other's who have done this before? I've bought two SAN devices in the past couple years, both run Debian and both are tier 1 enterprise storage arrays. Of course you wouldn't know they ran Debian or linux unless you tried to telnet to them on port 22 and saw the SSH banner. http://www.3par.com/inservtclass/ My active-active NAS head units runs CentOS 4.4 on IBM hardware (back end disk storage provided by above array) http://www.exanet.com/default.asp?contentID=209 > How would it compare to commercial SAN devices, Thecus N8800SAS > (http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=11&pid=177&set_language=english) > or something similar to these? > > I would probably use hardware RAID 10, and could go with either SAS / > SATA, and then probably offer iSCSI, Samba. NFS & rsync. > In terms of servers hardware, well either Tyan / SuperMicro / Intel / > Dell would be fine as well. But, my question is rather from a linux > point of view, how would Linux compare to dedicated NAS devices, in > terms of the OS managing the device? If you use a purpose-built appliance OS it should be pretty comparable, e.g. openfiler or freenas(bsd based?) to something like a Thecus. I used openfiler about 1.5 years ago mostly for iSCSI and it worked ok, at one point had 4 shelves of HP MSA SCSI disk drives attached to it each connected to dedicated RAID cards on an older HP DL585. I'm looking to get a Thecus N770 myself pretty soon, mainly for the smaller integrated form factor with many drive bays. nate