On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Ross Walker<rswwalker at gmail.com> wrote: > On Jul 23, 2009, at 8:33 PM, Clint Dilks <clintd at 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. Some time ago I was toying with the idea of having a number of hosts exporting network block devices to a server where I would coalesce them by means of LVM, then exporting the filesystem on one logical volume with NFS. Is this too crazy a setup? I understand reliability drops because of too many critical points of failure, but I would expect (though not know for sure) gnbd should come with some form of redundancy. Could this work as a cheap, scalable, poor man's solution? -- Eduardo Grosclaude Universidad Nacional del Comahue Neuquen, Argentina