[CentOS] using Linux as a front-end controller for a SAN?

[John R Pierce]

  On 10/12/10 10:39 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I hope someone can shed some light on this for me. Has anyone tried,
> or have experience with, setting up a Linux server to manage a few NAS
> devices and thus make them all visible to the clients as one large
> SAN?
>
> Basically, I'm thinking it would be a good idea to combine the current
> NAS's we have into one large system (typically a SAN?) and then let
> the clients all connect to one server (for authentication, LUN
> control, etc), but then when they need to access their drives /
> devices / LUN's, they get redirected to the specific server directly.
> I'm also thinking it could be a good way to say some IP addresses,
> i.e. instead of giving each NAS a public IP, they could all have
> private IP's and then everyone just connects to the public IP if
> needed. The servers which will access the NAS's will be on the same
> physical LAN and will also be on the same private IP subnet to make it
> easier.
>
> Does anyone know what I'm talking about?


how do you plan to implement redundancy on this system?   there's a 
-huge- single point of failure in the middle of what you're talking about.


would this be SAN storage (eg, block storage, like ISCSI, FC) or would 
it be NAS storage (file storage like NFS, SMB/CIFS) ?