Today I’m going to talk a little about storage technologies & solutions; specifically I’m going to talk about standard file servers, NAS storage, and iSCSI/FiberChannel SANs. … In years past, many companies just utilized native drive space on servers for storage. This is what I will be referring to as legacy file server technology; using file server protocols to share files located locally on the server. As companies grow and goals change, drive space utilization efficiency becomes more important. Being able to efficiently utilize every bit of space on each drive is important, but not always easy since servers and their respective requirements change. The only solution is to constantly move more/less smaller/larger drives around to meet space requirements on each server; eventually, this became an inefficient solution and newer technologies were born to address these issues. … NAS – Network Attached Storage: Network attached storage is an external storage solution that requires that drives are mapped over the network to servers/clients. Network attached drives appear on a system as a Network Share (eg: \\Nas\Sharename\). Systems that connect to a NAS share the drivespace; the drivespace provided to each system that connects to a NAS is not its own and is not dedicated space. … SAN – Storage Area Network: SANs work more like normal hard drives, but rather than connecting via SATA/IDE cables, they interface with the system over either Fiberchannel or Ethernet; giving them a much much faster throughput. SANs even appear within the OS as a local drive, allowing them a much greater flexibility in how they can be utilized. Additionally, on a SAN, the physical Hard Drives are pooled together to make a virtual drivespace pool that can then be allocated as needed to client/server systems in any size of virtual partition (known as LUNs). Each LUN on the SAN that is assigned out over Fiber/Ethernet to a system is dedicated drivespace and LUN sizes can be changed at any time without reinstalling an OS/software installed on the drivespace. … There are 2 types of SAN, both use the same protocols and fundamentals concepts, but the 2 types differ in the hardware that they use to reach these ends. … Fiber Channel – Fiber Channel SANs use Fiber optic cables to interface the Drivespace pool with the systems utilizing the space. Fiber Channel presents a few obstacles. Firstly, Fiber Channel requires that a separate Fiber-compatible switch is installed between the SAN and the systems utilizing the drive space. Next, Systems utilizing the drivespace MUST be equipped with Fiber-compatible network adapters known as HBAs. Finally, not all system administrators have the capability to manage a local fiber network, so additional personnel training is typically required. … iSCSI – iSCSI uses all the same fundamental concepts that a standard Fiber Channel SAN configuration uses, but it uses Ethernet as a network interface instead of Fiber Optic cabling. While iSCSI does have a 1Gbps throughput limitation and FiberChannel is 4Gbps; most of the bottleneck for most SANs is NOT the actual data transfer speed over the cable, the read/write seek is the main bottleneck. For this reason, the dramatically lower overhead cost of iSCSI and the very slight difference in overall performance makes iSCSI the option of choice for most companies right now. … Practical Examples NAS: A good practical use for a NAS would be to use it for common file storage on a network; much like a sharedrive. It is best used to store shared files/data that are commonly used by numerous people in a group regularly. SAN: Lets say you administrate a network of 150 computers, 40 of which originally only needed 100GB of space when the systems were setup. 3 months later, these 40 employees now need 1,000GB of space on each of their machines for programs they need to install. With legacy technologies, each of these machines would need to be backed up and the OS reinstalled on larger drives and the drives would need to be installed into each of the 40 machines; you would be looking at a week of work, minimum, to correct this. On a SAN setup, when the determination is made that these 40 systems needed 1,000GB of space, it would be as easy as opening the SAN interface and changing the allotted size for each of these machines from 100GB to 1,000GB. This entire procedure would take less than an hour and no software or data would be lost. https://youtube/watch?v=csdJFazj3h0
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 04:00:52 +0000
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