On Aug 17, 2013, at 5:16 PM, John R Pierce wrote: > On 8/16/2013 10:51 AM, Tony Schreiner wrote: >> Some years ago I installed a NAS unit from Exanet which consists of 2 rebadged IBM x3650 head nodes and a couple of Xyratex disk shelves with a total of 96 TB of raw disk, connected by fibre channel. The operating system is based on CentOS 4.4, but is modified, and runs a proprietary file system. It has pretty good performance and I'm happy with it. > > I would consider dumping the head nodes, and connecting the FC arrays > directly to the host HBA, and running them as fiber JBOD to a dedicated > host, which could run whatever sort of mdraid, lvm, file system you > want. or something like FreeNAS with ZFS and FreeBSD, then share stuff > via SMB, NFS, etc. > It may come to that eventually. Though I don't know why use say dump the head nodes, they are adequate servers (unless you mean overwrite them). The main reason I'm not doing that now, is that the Exanet software provides coherent caching between the 2 nodes for enhanced redundancy and performance. Additionally, I am stuck with the LUNs provides by the Xyratex until I am able to find a way to manage them. Tony