Would this be a SAN? (Minus the scaleability)

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imzjustplayin

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You have say 3 systems on your network, You take a Pentium III desktop, get like 5 HDDs, get a Raid Controller card, get three HBAs. Then you install the HBAs into all of the systems on the network. You take the PIII desktop, configure the raid array via the controller card, then you create a LUN (not sure how, this is where people can help fill me in on this), configure the HBA on the PIII desktop, then on the "client" machines, you configure the HBA and mount the LUN onto their machine, right?

Ok, so now I'm wondering, what/where would you go to configure the LUN so that the "client" machines on the network can access it?


Also, on SANs provided by IBM, HP or Dell etc.. I see that they use off the shelf processors and have a stripped down version of windows on them, you create the LUN and then you connect the servers to them. However, since they don't use dedicated raid cards per se (right?) what software do they use in order to create and configure the LUN? I'm assuming they're doing all the raid and LUN configuration in an software application IN Windows XP stripped down edition..
 
Short answer: No
Long answer: No, that is not a SAN.

I'd elaborate, but I'm short for time.
 
fibroptikl said:
Short answer: No
Long answer: No, that is not a SAN.

I'd elaborate, but I'm short for time.
Click to expand...

Well it wouldn't be a NAS because the intention would be for the LUN to be mounted and appear as a local disk instead of a network share. And if you're going to bring up the issue with sharing LUNs which apparently some OS' can't do, then you'd create two LUNs on the PIII desktop.
 
imzjustplayin said:
Well it wouldn't be a NAS because the intention would be for the LUN to be mounted and appear as a local disk instead of a network share. And if you're going to bring up the issue with sharing LUNs which apparently some OS' can't do, then you'd create two LUNs on the PIII desktop.
Click to expand...

Your way off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network

Most SAN's run their own propritary OS. You could setup that P3 system with iSCSI target software and technicall it would be an ISCSI san because the remote systems would see the disk a local.
 
Just a terminology note: A single storage chassis is not a "SAN", nor is a fiber switch or a HBA. A SAN is the culmination of the components. So as to what oakfan52 said, he's right about the OS part, but that applies to the OS of the storage chassis.

With that being said, some of the entry level setups use a storage chassis with multiple HBAs to direct connect to a limited number of HBAs on servers with out the need for a fiber switch. This is still technically a SAN in the same sense that a crossover cable between two PCs is still a network.
 
imzjustplayin said:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1030883345&postcount=13

Sure it's a proprietary version of windows but it IS a version of windows..
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Every single storage chassis I have ever worked with did not use Windows. Even for the ones that are Windows, it's proprietary code running the show. In short, you are not going to easily be able the build your own storage chassis. Your best option, as already mentioned, is to use iSCSI which could be (relatively) easy to build.

What are you going to use this for? If it is for a production system, you would be better of purchasing something that has vendor support. If it is for learning, many of the concepts can be learned using iSCSI.
 
So they're running a their own program inwhich it does all the LUN and Raid calculations on an off the shelf CPU instead of on a dedicated controller card? I think the thing that surprised me the most was that they could do raid on 40LUNs on like 4 Xeon processors.
 
When that's all that processor is doing, it's not that much work. Your bottleneck is still usually the fiber network and not the storage processor.
 
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