[TriLUG] ISCSI SAN

[Israel J Pattison]

Another option I haven't heard mentioned yet is "ATA over Ethernet", or
AoE.  Instead of buying fiber channel switches and interface cards, you use
off-the-shelf 100MB/1GB/10GB ethernet devices.  The cost savings are
substantial.  Unlike iSCSI which is a layer 3 protocol, AoE uses layer 2
networking.
We have an AoE device at my shop, and I use it as a virtual tape library for
our Bacula backup server.  Our device is a Coraid   (http://www.coraid.com)
SATA/RAID 1520.  It is a 4U, rack-mount device with 15 bays for SATA II
drives.  We use 300GB drives, but Coraid has recently added support for
500GB drives and perpendicular 750GB is in the future.  The device runs
linux.

>From the software side, the device lacks the eye-candy of an EMC or NetApp
device.  I use a serial console to connect to and configure the box. Support
for AoE has been in the Linux kernel for quite some time.  Drivers for
Windows are available, and Mac drivers are in development.  You can easily
slap any linux box in front of it to make a NAS-to-SAN gateway and provide
SMB/CIFS/NFS/FTP/HTTP/WebDAV/iFolder/etc. support.

Israel

On 7/23/06, Kevin Flanagan <kevin at flanagannc.net> wrote:
>
> EMC -
> My experience with EMC has been FAR from happy.  We have a handful of
> their SAN devices, and 2 of their NAS heads.  Every time you turn around
> there's another bit of something that you need to buy on top of the many
> dollars you have laid out.
>
> Their "Top NAS guy in the SouthEast" isn't, unless he's learned a lot in
> the 2 years since he was at my employer's site.  He was offended when I
> had the nerve to run a nessus scan on the NAS devices and management
> station, wouldn't answer any of my questions after that.
>
> Very expensive gear, and every disk is about 4X the cost of the same one
> from HP, just doesn't have the fancy plastic bezel.
>
> Other -
>
>     Have you looked at HP's offerings?  I haven't looked at ISCSI
> specifically from them, but I have always liked their stuff.  We put
> together a small SAN for a project of HP devices, cost 1/4th of the EMC
> offering.  The StorageWorks family from HP is very "mature", it's what
> used to be DEC, then Compaq storage business.
>
>
>
> Kevin
>
>
> Matt Pusateri wrote:
> > Hello Triluger's,
> >
> >
> > I've been tasked with finding our company a SAN.  Currently we've
> > looked at EMC & Lefthandnetworks.  Were leaning towards ISCSI,
> > corporate is a complete Windows shop, but we here in Raleigh are
> > almost completely Linux.  So I need to find something that plays nice.
> >  I thought about using openfiler(iscsi-target) and rolling my own, but
> > I don't think corporate will buy into it.  Anyone have any
> > suggestions/comments?  Direct experience comments appreciated, as
> > opposed to why don't you just use "Samba" comments :) Also if anyone
> > has a contact at Netapp let me know, I plan to look at them as well.
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Matt P.
> >
> >
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-- 
Israel J. Pattison
Raleigh, NC
Email: pattison at usa.com
Web: http://www.fanana.net

"Infinity, dear [friends], extends not only outward, but inward, into each
human heart."  -- Dr. E. Urner Goodman