-- Prasun Gupta, Systems Analyst Ringling School of Art and Design (941)359-7633 pgupta@ringling.eduQuoting Andrew M Hoerter <amh@pobox.com>:
> > On Fri, 2 May 2003 A.D., Prasun Gupta wrote: > > > We are currently using Solaris machines with fiber channel disks, and > > veritas volume manager. We are currently using ufs file systems. We have > > about a 1500 users and it will increase. > > Out of curiosity, is there a reason you're considering abandoning the > Solaris environment? Or is it simply cost savings by moving to cheaper > x86 hardware?
We are not going to abandon our current Solaris file Servers, we need to add more file servers to have a better load distribution, as our current file servers, have become I/O bottlenecks. We thought that instead of getting one Sun Server, we could deploy a lot more of linux based file servers. If we could do it.. We were thinking along the lines of Itanium based which is 64 bit. Again not sure if there is a stable linux 64 bit out there or not ???
> > Also, if you're currently using an all-Sun environment, moving to Linux/x86 > may be a rude awakening for you. System integration will fall on your > shoulders, whereas the major vendors put a lot of effort into making all > the technology pieces fit together (this is especially important for > moving targets like Fibre Channel, which is non-trivial to get working). > > > I went through the file system discussions, and it seemed to me that xfs > > would be the most appropriate. > > Have you looked at AFS at all? In an environment with lots of clients where > scaleability is important, AFS is a big win. > > The open source version of AFS is OpenAFS: > > http://www.openafs.org/ > > It's essentially a fork of the commercial IBM AFS offering, and is actively > maintained. >
We were thinking of AFS also, but I was surprised that nobody in the last discussion even mentioned anything about AFS. Do you know if AFS will run in Linux OS or not?? I used to think AFS was the best, but does anybody feel that XFS might be better. The other question I had, was if any volume managers are available, for supporting, these file systems.
> > Does anybody know if linux will have drivers for fiber channel disks ?? > > I've evaluated various SAN configurations involving Linux machines equipped > with QLogic fiber HBAs. It pretty much worked fine, although we didn't > do much stress testing. According to QLogic it's an officially supported > platform, but there may be caveats with regard to what kernel versions you > can run. I don't remember whether we ran the HBAs in fabric mode or not, > but if you're setting up any kind of advanced SAN environment you'll want > to carefully test the capabilities of the driver. Fibre Channel is still > kind of rough around the edges, it's best not to trust the vendor's > assurances that "sure, it'll do that!" And a lot depends on what kind of > switches/HBAs/disks you have, firmware levels, etc. > > As far as the disks themselves are concerned, you're running SCSI over FC, > so the standard SCSI block drivers are used. It shouldn't work any > differently from a regular SCSI drive in that respect, once the underlying > FC stuff is working. > >
So, it seems that Linux can support, the Fiber Channel. That is good to know. BTW. Which Linux distributions have you seen that would work with Fiber Channel SANS ???
We feel that if the a given Linux based hardware can be an industry strength file server. We could get 10 such file servers instead of one Sun Server. That is the reason we are looking into this direction. The biggest questions we are facing are, will all our applications run in the environment.
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