Am 12.06.2013 08:33, schrieb Dan Johansson: > On 12.06.2013 06:57, Norman Rieß wrote: >> Am 11.06.2013 16:19, schrieb Nick Khamis: >>> Hello Everyone, >>> >>> Was wondering what people are running these days, and how do they >>> compare to the 10,000 dollar SAN boxes. We are looking to build a fiber >>> san using IET and glusterFS, and was wondering what kind of luck people >>> where having using this approach, or any for that matter. >> >> the question is, what are you doing with it and why do you think you >> need a fibre channel SAN. >> Our goal indeed is to get rid of the SAN infrastructure as it is >> delicately to all kinds of failure with nearly zero fault tolerance. >> An example, you have an hicup or a power failure in your network. SAN is >> dead from nowon and must be reinitialized on the server. Simple NFS >> comes back up without any fuzz. >> Another, you boot your storage systems due to an os update or something >> like that. Your SAN will be dead. NFS will just go on as if nothing >> happened. >> We use netapp storage systems which are NAS and SAN capable. >> Another point is, that if you have a SAN lun, there is either no way to >> increase or decrease size on the fly, on cifs or nfs you can resize your >> share on the go. >> >> So if you do not have a _really_ good reason to use a fribre channel >> SAN, don't! > > Hello, > > I tend to disagree. A correctly designed SAN (using dual Fabric among > other things) is a lot more stable and has a lot better performance than > any NAS (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI) solution. One other thing that also needs to > be correctly configured to have a stable SAN infrastructure is the > servers on it (Multipathing, partition alignment, queue depth, ...) > according to the storage vendors recommendation. > LUN expansion/shrink is storage vendor specific, some can not (netapp > apparently) but others can. > > Just my 2 cents. > > Regards, >
Hello, you are right i did not elaborate on our san setup, but dual fabric, correctly configured hba, proper timeout settings, multipathing, alignment and proper block sizes, all was cared for. And yes, it is stable as long, as no glitch in power, network etc. or maintenance is due. Here NFS is far more fault tolerant. Our servers are equipped with 10GE ports, which are bonded. Performance is not the issue. Further more, is the configuration far easier and more robust. According to roadmaps ethernet will outperform SAN infrastructure by factors soon. Oh, you can resize the lun, but on the server side you have a blockdevice exposed and need to unmount, resize if possible and mount again. On nfs it is a df for the old size, resizing and a df with the new size with no service downtime. Regards, Norman
