On Tue, July 18, 2006 11:35 am, Matt Nash wrote: > Matt Pusateri wrote: >> Hello Triluger's, >> >> >> I've been tasked with finding our company a SAN. Currently we've >> looked at EMC & Lefthandnetworks. Were leaning towards ISCSI, >> corporate is a complete Windows shop, but we here in Raleigh are >> almost completely Linux. So I need to find something that plays >> nice. >> I thought about using openfiler(iscsi-target) and rolling my own, >> but >> I don't think corporate will buy into it. Anyone have any >> suggestions/comments? Direct experience comments appreciated, as >> opposed to why don't you just use "Samba" comments :) Also if anyone >> has a contact at Netapp let me know, I plan to look at them as well. >> >> Thanks >> >> Matt P. >> >> > The company I work for bought 3 Left Hand units in January, and so far > they have worked fine without a hitch. Even MS plays well with them! > My understanding from the installing technician is that the boxes > themselves are off-the-shelf servers running a specialized Linux OS. > The management console is multiplatform, written in Java, and is very > straightforward and easy to understand. > > I haven't tried mounting one of the iSCSI targets on a Linux machine, > but that is an experiment I have planned for when I have run out of > work > to do. > > Left Hand's technology is pretty interesting, and should be more > easily > scaled than EMC. Not to mention MUCH MUCH cheaper. > -- > 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/ >
Lefthand is in the running, but I saw issues I didn't like as much. These issues may relate to all SAN's, as I'm not that SAN aware yet. Lefthand issues: 1. All access has to be via iSCSI. I would prefer if I could NFS/SMB mount a share if I had to in a pinch. I think NetApp does this Yes I could mount to an iSCSI server and then mount off of there, but I like options. 2. Backups must be done over the network, it would be nice to be able to backup directly from the SAN box, that is if it's a smaller SAN, and not a mutli-box clustered unit. 3. Lefthand stores that data in a raw format(proprietary?), I'd like to be able to be able to access the data directly via it's native file format in case of system failure. Now lefthand does have a network raid solution to help mitigate, but again I like options. 4. I'm not sure I'm wild about lefthand's management interface, and they have no way to tie user management/authentication into an external store such as LDAP or AD. 5. I know there's a five I can't think of it right now :) I do however like their commodity hardware and also their clustering. There's a UK company that supposedly offers clustering support for openfiler, but I don't think it's all that mature yet. Matt P. -- 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/
