[lug] SANS v. NAS

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 08:49:21AM -0700, Jeffrey Brown wrote:
>  Is there such a thing as a consumer grade SAN controller?  Not sure what you mean by "consumer" although the prices are coming down.

A Linux box can run as an iSCSI server.  In fact, ISTR seeing iSCSI as an
option in the Linksys WRT-54G firmware.  That was probably client side
instead of server, because server wouldn't be THAT useful.

>  Can one boot from a SAN disk?  Yes.

If your system supports booting from iSCSI, or you set it up such that it
boots a Linux kernel configured properly to get it's root file-system from
iSCSI.  For example, you could use PXE (which is more common than native
iSCSI) to boot a custom kernel that then knows how to get to it's root
file-system over iSCSI.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 "If all you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail."
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability
      Back off man. I'm a scientist.   http://HackingSociety.org/