[ale] SAN

[Lightner, Jeff]

Technically what you're talking about is a NAS (network attached
storage) not a SAN (storage area network).   The difference being a NAS
offers shares (NFS, CIFS etc...) where as SAN uses fibre to present the
storage to the host the same way internal storage is.   NAS requires no
special hardware other than networking.  SAN requires fibre adapters on
both the storage array and the hosts and often requires SAN switches for
zoning storage to prevent all hosts from seeing all the storage.

I don't work much with NAS so can't answer the question as to what to
use for the storage cluster you want to build.  There are multiple NAS
solutions/appliances available.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim
Butler
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 3:06 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] SAN


  Hi everyone..
I need to put together a storage area network.. (I've never done it 
before).. Is there a good open-source (and FREE) SAN software available?
What I want, is to create a storage cluster and then serve file-shares 
via NFS to various servers in our organization. Any insight would be 
appreciated.

Thank you,
Jim Butler

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