From: john mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: What is a "SAN" ?
Perhaps a better question would be: What's a basement SAN? Imagine a box that plugs into a basement 100base-T LAN and serves only the purpose of file storage. It would _probably_ be a computer, as well, but it's only purpose would be to allow other computers on the network to read and write files there using standard network protocols (NFS, SMB, etc.) More to the point, if I melt-down my new Fedora box and have to fail back to Debian, I won't accidentally overwrite my home directory in the process. And if I need to get to my saved email from the PowerBook before I get a shell prompt back, it's available. I saw a box at BestBuy with USB and 100base-T ports to serve this purpose, but was hoping I could get something a little cheaper, or maybe just a bit more hackable. Now imagine three of them working as a networked RAID SAN, so if one goes belly up, I can just replace it without worrying about the files on it. Let the RAID re-sync and sort them out. Add a new box to the network and increase the total network storage, etc. iSCSI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-iscsi/) looks promising as a connection protocol, but I'd need hardware to implement it. If there are other suggestions, I'm all ears. -- Steve Holton [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
