andreil1 wrote:

On Apr 7, 2009, at 12:11 PM, Per Jessen wrote:

...

You take a pile of SAN hardware - fibre switches, fibre HBAs and some fibre cables. You decide a level of redundancy and add more equipment as needed. And that is really just about it.

I've got a 1Gbit fibre SAN setup that I'm slowly phasing out, feel free to ask questions.

Which software you use to run SAN server? Do you connect local workstations through Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel? MacOS for example do not have built-in iSCSI client, and that might be the problem.

Let me describe our setup: we have two Compaq fibre switches (SAN Switch 8) that form the core of the network. On the storage side, we have two Compaq SWKS arrays, one with 24 and one with 48 drives, each with two dual-ported SCSI controllers. Each of the four SCSI controllers is connected to both fibre switches. That way we have redundancy on the controller level as well as on the switch level. Our servers have Emulex HBAs, two ports per server. Each port connects to one of the fibre switches. Software-wise, we don't use anything special, just multi-pathing and LVM.

PS. If you have some old SAN equipment you do not need may be you can consider to sell it?

Yes, that's not a problem - write to me off-line and let me know what you're looking for. Keep in mind that this is all 1Gbit/s equipment, so it's not exactly the latest model. /Per -- Per Jessen, Zürich (16.4°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Tue, 7 Apr 2009 23:37:10 Greg Freemyer wrote:

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 4:25 AM, andreil1 wrote:

...

Hi!

Anyone can suggest how to build SAN solution on Linux? Clients will be both Mac and Windows.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion(s).

Andre,

If you are talking about Linux as a SAN client, then its done all over the place.

If you are talking about Linux as a SAN storage server, then I have no personal knowledge

I know you can setup a iSCSI server based on Linux, but that is a far cry from having all the management tools one expects out of a SAN storage system.

There are opensource NAS solutions. FreeNAS is one. Don't recall if it is Linux, BSD, etc. A NAS exports NFS / CIFS as opposed to raw block devices. [...]

FreeNAS is BSD (meaning it should be rock solid). There is an installatble LiveCD disk .iso image that is only around 60MB from memory (so it is pretty light on resources too). HTH. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ===================================================