From: marty [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
>> Take hard disk. Stick hard disk in box with CPU, memory and network
>> connection. Add software (firmware) that does Samba type stuff. Get
>> marketing department to come up with new acronym. Attempt to become
>> more than a hard disk manufacturer and get a bigger piece of
>the action.
>>
>> (That was my understanding of it. Feel free to prove me wrong.)
>
>i was kind of wondering myself if SAN = NAS
>
>ie. storage area network = network attached storage
>
>anyone?
Not usually. SANs are usually implemented on a fiber channel bus and not an
IP network. These are not mounted (as in Samba), but are installed as
kernel modules and act like a hard drive to the kernel. The benefit of SANs
is they are true peer to peer communication so the backup device can talk
directly to the RAID arrays without involving the machine using those
drives, or you can have multiple machines with a read-only drive pointing to
the same physical device (this is in /dev, not in /mnt). Fiber channel also
allows distances of up to about 40km between host and device without
affecting the throughput and so giving location independance for true
fault-tolerant operation.
Think of a SAN as a separate network (not IP or Ethernet) for storage
devices.
John Wiltshire
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
