[lug] SANS v. NAS

[Jeffrey Brown]

>>> siegfried at heintze.com 12/28/2005 8:57:36 PM >>>

Is there such a thing as a consumer grade SAN controller? I read originally
SAN as fibre optic only but that they now accommodate copper. How would a
consumer grade SAN disk connect to my PC? I don't think I have fibre optic
connection on the back of my new desktop PC. Can one boot from a SAN disk?


## Reply ##

SAN's are built with the SCSI command set and given that, the transport can be anything. So SCSI commands can be run over any type of network i.e. IP or FC or in a given API or emulation layer such as Linuxes USB interface and cdrecord's SCSI emulation. Also SAN's deal with block level transfers and NAS's deal with file level transfers.

So, to more directly answer your questions, 
  Is there such a thing as a consumer grade SAN controller?  Not sure what you mean by "consumer" although the prices are coming down.
  How would a consumer grade SAN disk connect to my PC?  iSCSI.
  Can one boot from a SAN disk?  Yes.

More info can be found here http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/