[TriLUG] "basement" SAN

[sholton at mindspring.com]

From: john mitchell <john280z at earthlink.net> writes:

What is a "SAN" ?

Perhaps a better question would be: What's a basement SAN?

Imagine a box that plugs into a basement 100base-T LAN and serves
only the purpose of file storage.  It would _probably_ be a computer,
as well, but it's only purpose would be to allow other computers on
the network to read and write files there using standard network
protocols (NFS, SMB, etc.) 

More to the point, if I melt-down my new Fedora box and have to 
fail back to Debian, I won't accidentally overwrite my home 
directory in the process. And if I need to get to my saved email
from the PowerBook before I get a shell prompt back, it's 
available.

I saw a box at BestBuy with USB and 100base-T ports to serve 
this purpose, but was hoping I could get something a little cheaper,
or maybe just a bit more hackable.

Now imagine three of them working as a networked RAID SAN, so
if one goes belly up, I can just replace it without worrying about the
files on it. Let the RAID re-sync and sort them out. Add a new box
to the network and increase the total network storage, etc.

iSCSI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-iscsi/) looks promising 
as a connection protocol, but I'd need hardware to implement it.

If there are other suggestions, I'm all ears.


-- 
Steve Holton
sholton at mindspring.com