|
Home > Archive > Data Storage > May 2006 > NAS or SAN? Fibre channel or iSCSI?
You are viewing an archived Text-only version of the thread.
To view this thread in it's original format and/or if you want to reply to
this thread please [click here]
| Author |
NAS or SAN? Fibre channel or iSCSI?
|
|
|
| Hi all. I'm implementing an high availability and load balanced cluster with
linux. I have two redirectors that dispatch requests to two mail servers
and two web servers.
I'm not sure about the storage. SAN fiber channel solutions by NetApp or by
EMC are out of our budget. The Apple's SAN Xserve is cheaper but I'm not
sure about its compatibilities with linux. Does anyone know about this?
Do you advise me to go with a NAS solution with two redundant NFS servers or
to try other alternatives like SAN on iSCSI or DAS?
Does anyone use SAN iSCSI solutions? How about linux support?
Thanks in advance,
Alex
| |
|
| Interesting question, without knowing anything about your capacity and
throughput reqs, I'd say that a SAN solution would save you money
because you are going to avoid the need to use redundant NAS systems.
SAN storage with redundant controllers and power will probably do the
trick for you.
iSCSI can work very well and I think you should definitely check out
Equallogic as the best vendor in that market. I do not have iSCSI
myself but as the joke goes - some of my best friends use iSCSI. More
seriously, I have spoken to a large number of their customers who rave
about the service, reliability, performance, etc. Their customer sat is
not perfect, but its as good if not better than almost anybody else in
the business. They support most common Linux distributions as well as
Windows and Solaris if that is important to you.
Stay away from DAS. It makes it much harder to change/upgrade systems
in your web/system architecture. You are much better having independent
storage resources.
| |
|
|
As far as my knowledge goes, DAS is not that bad, but it depends the
kind of environment setup you are looking for.
DAS reduces the redundacy and also if in future the data is going to
get expanded then my suggestion would be to opt for SAN environment.
SAN is definitely going to cost you more than DAS, since it would add
more number of hardware on your system including Fabric Switches.
iSCSI is better option, when you need to replicate u r data at remote
end (> 50 KM away), although never used so far.
| |
|
| Can you provide more detail as to the number of server, email application
and the amount of storage you need? EMC may not be out of your price range
at all. What is your budget and timeframe?
iSCSI is always a consideration and Equallogic is the master in that arena.
"Alex" <alex@nospam.it> wrote in message
news:44226d30$0$2274$4fafbaef@reader4.news.tin.it...
> Hi all. I'm implementing an high availability and load balanced cluster
> with
> linux. I have two redirectors that dispatch requests to two mail servers
> and two web servers.
>
> I'm not sure about the storage. SAN fiber channel solutions by NetApp or
> by
> EMC are out of our budget. The Apple's SAN Xserve is cheaper but I'm not
> sure about its compatibilities with linux. Does anyone know about this?
>
> Do you advise me to go with a NAS solution with two redundant NFS servers
> or
> to try other alternatives like SAN on iSCSI or DAS?
>
> Does anyone use SAN iSCSI solutions? How about linux support?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Alex
| |
| Fortuitous Technologies 2006-05-12, 1:12 am |
| > Hi all. I'm implementing an high availability and load balanced cluster with
> linux. I have two redirectors that dispatch requests to two mail servers
> and two web servers.
>
> I'm not sure about the storage. SAN fiber channel solutions by NetApp or by
> EMC are out of our budget. The Apple's SAN Xserve is cheaper but I'm not
> sure about its compatibilities with linux. Does anyone know about this?
>
> Do you advise me to go with a NAS solution with two redundant NFS servers or
> to try other alternatives like SAN on iSCSI or DAS?
> Does anyone use SAN iSCSI solutions? How about linux support?
Alex,
Without knowing more information about your actual needs, it would be
difficult to give you decent advice. What is your workload requirement,
capacity, future scalability? You should seriously consider getting a
capacity planner to design this for you. It will probably end up saving
you from financial and political stress.
-Phil Carinhas
--
Fortuitous Technologies Inc - http://fortuitous.com
Performance Engineering, Capacity Planning & Unix Services
| |
| steven.russo@yahoo.com 2006-05-15, 7:12 pm |
| Hi Alex,
Generally, NAS is better for unstructured content. It offers a good
degree of virtualization so that you can hide the namespace and network
shares from the actual backend storage (disks and shelves) that are
servicing the data.
As others have stated, you need to mention how much data you have. If
it is only a few terabytes, it doesent really matter what you use, you
can add iSCSI to the back of a Linux NAS head. Since EMC and NetApp
are out of the question, I would guess you dont have much data to begin
with.
A proper strategy for unstructured content is to use NAS heads which in
turn themselves are connected in the back to a SAN, so you get two
degrees of virtualization (one at a filer level with network shares so
the application servers never need to be aware of storage adds and
removes) and one at a block level so disks and volumes are abstracted
to the filers.
Unless you have a real small amount of data or you have Exchange, dont
go with DAS. When youre data grows, you will have problems.
Steve
|
|
|
|
|