[nylug-talk] SAN, NAS advice needed

[Henning Follmann]

Alex Pilosov wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Henning Follmann wrote:
> 
>> Hello fellow NYLUGgers,
>>
>> I am in the market for filer and need some advice here.
>>
>> The current requirements are 1 - 1.5 TB in storage space in either a
>> RAID 5 or RAID 10.
>>
>> My current instinct was to get a SAN solution and build a NAS gateway
>> based on linux. So I am looking for a FC HBA which is supported under
>> linux. And I also would appreciate any pointer to any SAN appliances and
>> probably some comments about this appliance.
> Can you give more details on what are you trying to do, and what are the 
> requirements? 
> 
> If you just need NAS, it is far cheaper to buy a NAS box (basically a PC
> with raid controller and buncha drives - 4*500G drives will give you 1.5TB
> raid5 at minimal cost).
> 
> If you need SAN (meaning, you want to have separate storage and access),
> its a bit more complicated. Today, I'd look at iSCSI and SAS solutions in
> addition to FC solutions.
> 
> -alex



The requirements might change in the future, so that is why I am looking 
for a SAN.

The current requirements are actually NAS. Exactly: an NFS server, not 
even SMB.
Because this is small business and there might be a requirement for a 
large db system in the future I was thinking of a SAN with some room to 
expand. As long if we just use the NAS I would connect the SAN directly 
to the NAS gateway (not spending money on a FC switch). Also I was 
thinking of a SAN which allows for two independent RAIDS (obviously, 
otherwise I could just use a NAS appliance).

I actually was even looking at SCSI. I looked at the MSA20 series from 
HP as a cheap solution. But that did not allow for the db solution.


Henning