[lug] talk idea per last meeting

[dio2002 at indra.com]

similar to the cloud idea presented last night, i was thinking that
something on SAN, VM, clustering would be a really great idea.  basically
the infrastructure that supports the cloud from an admin / provider
perspective.  almost as an adjunct to the cloud presentation.

wouldn't you know it, the post (included below) by maxwell today kind of
gets most of what i described above in one useful, integrated example ;) 
some of us may or may not work with any or none of those in isolation. 
but marrying them together as a whole is where things are headed these
days.  whether you're going to be administering the infrastructure or a
consumer of the services provided on it, it's all very relevant.  i'd love
to see a presentation on this in a more hands on kind of environment.

the problem for most / some of us is if your work environment hasn't
invested in this kind of infrastructure, it's hard to get any exposure to
it.  the other caveat is that someone has to have the knowledge, the
equipment (even a small scale version of it), the willingness and the
permission to actually put something like this together and or make it
available to the group.  that's a lot to ask.

maybe a saturday thing would be better like an installfest?

just thinking out loud since the question was brought up last night.

thanks

===========================

This is how many of us expect enterprise computing to develop in the
future and your requests now sounds a lot like what everyone else is
trying to do:

1) Setup a Storage Area Network (SAN) that consists of a large array of
hard drives connected to an intelligent disk controller which is then
connected to a dedicated high speed network.  On the SAN, from the total
amount of storage space available, slice and dice it to make storage
volumes (LUNs) that can be made available on the network to machines as
needed.

2) Place your applications within virtual machines based on how you
would like to balance them: customer, or priority, or queue, etc.  Use a
virtual machine manager that can move virtual machines easily from one
server to another.  This will let you move virtual machines of low
priority to slow, energy-efficient CPUs while moving other high priority
virtual machines (and their high priority applications) to faster more
expensive CPUs.

3) Because the storage is networked, your virtual machines can still
access all the data regardless of where they are physically running.
You can resize VMs, reallocate processors to VMs and reallocate storage
space as needed.

The only drawback to this is that its currently quite expensive but for
enterprise operations it can be worth it.

On a smaller scale, I would setup a few servers with LVM and beat on
them until you either trust them or find specific reasons not to.  Alot
of the functionality of a hardware SAN can be implemented with a low
cost server running Linux and some quality, commodity hardware.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler