On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:07 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote: > 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. > True, but then one could setup a HA server for the management server. And probably some load balancer(s) to cater for high availability. > > would this be SAN storage (eg, block storage, like ISCSI, FC) or would > it be NAS storage (file storage like NFS, SMB/CIFS) ? > both? Many NAS devices offer both iSCSI & NFS / SMB / CIFS. Ideally, I want to setup a scalable SAN, with reliability in mind on a RAID 6 / RAID10 concept, but need each client to only connect to the relevant server where his data is stored. -- Kind Regards Rudi Ahlers SoftDux Website: http://www.SoftDux.com Technical Blog: http://Blog.SoftDux.com Office: 087 805 9573 Cell: 082 554 7532