SAN Design Feedback

N

nmp0906

I am looking to accomplish the task of building a budget SAN. Its first use will be as an archive/backup solution, but hopefully in time I can stabilize and tune the configuration to be used for more important / critical tasks.

My current working design follows a NetApp setup with filer "heads" and disk "shelves". In reality, each are separate servers with specific tasks.

The disk shelves are 12-16 SATA HotSwap servers loaded with 1.5TB drives. I want to make these iSCSI targets. I am still debating whether to do hardware/software RAID at this level or export each disk individually.

The filer head would map these iSCSI targets via the iSCSI initiator and aggregate these in a fault tolerant way to present combined storage that can be served up via any number of protocols (NFS for *nix boxes, CIFS for Windows, etc).

I need to also make the filer heads redundant / highly available. If one fails, the other takes over (eventually this needs to be seamless to the hosts, ie. they don't have to remount the share). Disk shelves are already redundant in the fact that there is some sense of RAID applied across them.

The goal is to be able to add shelves and aggregate the extra storage as needed. ZFS (available with FreeNAS) is really intriguing in this regard.

I am evaluating OpenFiler and FreeNAS. Do you have any thoughts, opinions, or comments on accomplishing this? I realize it's possible to set this up manually using Linux or BSD on each, but either OpenFiler or FreeNAS would make this extremely easy for initial setup and ongoing support (even for the Windows admins).

Thanks.
 
Understood. This is meant to be a more general BSD-based advice question. FreeNAS is just a tool using the BSD base, but not necessarily the only (or best) option and has only minor relevance to the overall design principles. :)
 
How efficient is really iSCSI? Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just make a big NAS? Also I think the new HAST service would perfectly fit in a SAN/HAST solution.
 
Use ZFS, then use ZVOL's as the iscsi target device. That's the way it's done on OpenSolaris although more tightly integrated. Much more flexible than raw disk/partitions/raw files/sparse files.

Use istgt as the target.

You can use HAST or zfs send/receive, HAST probably easiest/best solution.
 
Galactic_Dominator said:
Use ZFS, then use ZVOL's as the iscsi target device. That's the way it's done on OpenSolaris although more tightly integrated. Much more flexible than raw disk/partitions/raw files/sparse files.

Use istgt as the target.

You can use HAST or zfs send/receive, HAST probably easiest/best solution.
Click to expand...

What perfect timing: Using HAST with CARP and ZFS

:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top