[CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

[Rainer Duffner]

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