I haven't looked NAS vs. SAN for a while, but I know the environment has been shifting quite a bit over the last couple of years. Maybe others on the mailing list have done recent work in that area?
However, to answer that question, NAS, SAN, or traditional serving, you'll want to take a rather organized approach:. This sounds lke a strategic issue for your company, so you'll want to get this architecture right.
So just a few of the questions, you'll need to answer, before you can make a good decision include:
* what are the throughput requirements i.e. how much traffic is there - for reading vs. for writing?
* is the data somewhat horizontally or vertically split? - or could it be? - if yes, for how much effort?
* how is the data being stored and accessed? (e.g. relational dbms, flat files, lots of small files/tables, fewer huge files/tables)?
* what are the updating and retrieving applications?
Those are some of the questions, which come to my mind in the first 30 seconds. So even a NAS and SAN expert probably will not be able to give you an intelligent answer for your context without analyzing some of those above parameters.
Regards, ...Niels
J. Rafael S�nchez wrote:
Hey thanks, I will investigate this for sure. It's just that it'd be nice to be able to run one box, connect to it, and from there, be able to administer services on other servers.
Thanks again for your response. I'll take a look at webmin.
Hey, before I say good bye...You don't have to answer this one, but I thought about this as was thinking that maybe you have come across situations like this.
I work for a company that, because of the nature of it's business,
[remote sensing], generates huge amounts of data. Currently, I handle
close to three terrabytes worth of data.
In the near future, with the release of new versions of our spectrograph
imagers, the amount of data space is only growing exponentially. We're
talking one individual box (server) holding up to 4 Terrabytes of data;
two for processing and 2 for mirrorring.
Just from the point of view of storage, have you had to implement anything like this? Would you consider SANs or NASs for something like this? Would you implement rack mount type of systems, or would you use towers and external enclosures?
Thanks,
Rafael.
On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 14:24, Niels Voll wrote:
Hi Rafael, thanks for your kind words.
You definitely need to have a webmin installation on each server, that you want to administer. It is that local webmin installation, which edits configuration files, starts and stops services, recompiles the sendmail configuration file, etc.
I have not tried this myself, since currently I'm only managing one server, but it seems that webmin provides a convenient feature, which can pass through requests from one webmin server to another.
This is a quote from the webmin online book
"You may also configure Webmin to connect you to the server through a proxied connection, if you provide a user name and password for the other server. This can be useful when connecting remotely to a front-end Webmin server on the routable Internet that also connects to a non-routable private network, allowing an administrator outside of the private network to tunnel through to administer systems inside the private network.
Versions of Webmin beyond 0.85 provide support for some functions to be executable via remote procedure calls, if login information is provided for the remote server. This allows a single Webmin server to directly configure or monitor other Webmin servers. Currently this functionality is limited to the System and Server Status module and some of the 22 modules in the Cluster category. It is likely that many of the other modules will expand to take advantage of this new functionality in the future."
This book in pdf format is available at http://www.swelltech.com/support/pdfs/webminguide.pdf
Kind regards, ...Niels
J. Rafael Sánchez wrote:
Hi Niels,_______________________________________________
I would like to thank you for your presentation last night. As well as the other two gentlemen who also presented. Thanks a bunch.
I have a question about webmin, though, Neils.
Can you have one server runing one instance of webmin, and so configure other servers's services or does every server that runs separate services need to have an instance of webmin?
Thank you.
Rafael.
On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 11:42, Niels Voll wrote:
Hi everyone,
as promised, my presentation slides and a detailed step by step document can be found here.
My presentation was called, "Building a small business server with minimal effort and cost", but maybe it should have been called
"How I built my own server appliance"
The presentation slides outline really more what I wanted to achieve, and the larger issues I encountered.
The detailed document may be useful for someone, who wants to have step by step notes about setting up one of the following tools:
yum - package manager -- if you are running Red Hat 9 (and I believe 8 and 7), yum is a very convenient command line tool for keeping your system up-to-date; you just need to point yum at different repositories in the /etc/yum.conf file;
sendmail - if you want to allow SMTP authentication and/or encrypted SMTP traffic
vsftpd - one of the more secure FTP servers around
webmin - browser based administration of your server, for those of you who are browser bigots like me :) -- as I found out yesterday, several of you really hate doing important work via the browser :)
phpMyAdmin - browser based administration for your MySql server - ditto - browser bigots only :)
Both documents are available in html, pdf, or OpenOffice formats.
Their unavailability in .doc and .ppt is not a technical issue, but a political statement :)
If anything should be of use to you, feel free to copy, modify, ...
If you find any errors, I'd be grateful for the feedback, so I can correct the document(s)
Here's the link:
http://www.voho.com
Warm regards, ...Niels
---------------------------- Niels Voll [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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