[gentoo-user] Re: Strategy for using SAN/NAS for storage with Gentoo...

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Steve <gentoo_sjh@shic.co.uk> writes:

> I have recently started looking at server resilience and availability in
> the context of a hardware failure or hardware upgrade.  I've come to the
> conclusion that it would be very desirable if terrabyte-scale data did
> not need to be restored from backup.  This isn't a commercial server -
> so I'm interested in minimum cost approaches.
>
> With this in mind, I'm interested to discover what represents
> state-of-the-art from the perspective of the OS and its configuration. 
> Issues I envisage are:
>
> * With NAS, it would be desirable to have a Linux filesystem rather than
> access files over CIFS - this raises further questions about protocol...
> is NFS as hopelessly outdated as it seems?  Are there any products that
> offer NFS access?  Are any of them secure?
> * With a SAN, questions of filesystem features are diminished - but
> questions of access protocol remain.  What is best supported by gentoo?
> * Do any gentooists have any inexpensive hardware configurations that
> work especially well?
>
> Any hints or tips?

Someone here, a yr or two ago recommended to me when I asked that
question to install opensolaris on a machine and set it up as NAS.

Opensolaris offers the zfs file system, that is really advanced
compared to others.

I'll admit I've had some issues along the way.  And have to do lots of
boning up on opensolaris.

I access the zfs server by cifs from windows machines, and by NFS from
linux.

Opensolaris doesn't use samba by default.  Instead they have their own
CIFS server which works fine.  They do have samba pkgs but no one
hardly use it, preferring their CIFS server.

Mine  is only a home lan setup, but even then the opensolaris server
has over a terabyte of capacity.

I have it setup in 3 mirrors of 2 disks each.

2 prs of 500gb sata hdd and one pr of 750 sata hdd

There are many ways so setup `zraid' systems on `zfs' that are excellent for
reliability. ( I have been told.... I haven't tried that route).

For me the mirror setup seemed good for my small needs.  Even more
reliable I'm told, if a bit higher in disk usage.

opensolaris zfs fs offers a `timeslider' interface to a system of
snapshotting the filesystems in 15 min, 1hr 1day etc snapshots in a
very small footprint way.  You'd have to read up on it.. It would take
too much off topic to cover here.  The system takes an amazing small
amount of disk space for the snapshots based on COW (Copy on write).

There was talk of opensolaris going by the wayside with the Oracle
takeover of Sun... but Oracle has since announced its intention of
puttin even more resources into `opensolaris' development than Sun was
doing.

These may be a good intro to zfs:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/zfs_part1.scalable.jsp
http://all-unix.blogspot.com/2007/03/zfs-cow-and-relate-features.html
http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSolarisInfoPL/How+to+Manage+the+Automatic+ZFS+Snapshot+Service