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Mad Monk · 09-11-2007, 01:08 PM

I know, but I spend so much time with it, it feels like mine, plus I have all my music and videos on it.

A SAN is like a NAS on steroids and is accessible to as many machines as you can afford to connect to them. It's like a NAS that appears as a locally-connected drive to whatever machine you "present" it to (and however much you need to present to it). There are a lot of differences and complexities with a SAN. One big difference is that typically on a SAN, you have a separate fiber channel network connecting to the servers rather than over the slower LAN. Super-high speed access, high security by isolating disk access to servers through zoning (think VLANs for disk access), super-high availability and redundancy - but all at a super-high cost.

I have around 180 servers connected to four different SANs at various locations. We carve out LUNs that are anywhere from 100GB to around 500-750GB at a time for servers to use.

We do use several NAS appliances for 3rd-tier storage though. They are very handy and inexpensive to use and deploy.

Personally, I have old 30GB and 80GB SNAP servers at my home that stores all my pictures and file backups.

09-11-2007, 01:08 PM	#8 (permalink)
Mad Monk Major Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: O-O-O-O-Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. Posts: 3,045	Re: Terafying I know, but I spend so much time with it, it feels like mine, plus I have all my music and videos on it. A SAN is like a NAS on steroids and is accessible to as many machines as you can afford to connect to them. It's like a NAS that appears as a locally-connected drive to whatever machine you "present" it to (and however much you need to present to it). There are a lot of differences and complexities with a SAN. One big difference is that typically on a SAN, you have a separate fiber channel network connecting to the servers rather than over the slower LAN. Super-high speed access, high security by isolating disk access to servers through zoning (think VLANs for disk access), super-high availability and redundancy - but all at a super-high cost. I have around 180 servers connected to four different SANs at various locations. We carve out LUNs that are anywhere from 100GB to around 500-750GB at a time for servers to use. We do use several NAS appliances for 3rd-tier storage though. They are very handy and inexpensive to use and deploy. Personally, I have old 30GB and 80GB SNAP servers at my home that stores all my pictures and file backups. __________________