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Saturday, March 17, 2007
BANGALORE, INDIA: Last month, we showed you how to build your own NAS box, and carried a comprehensive guide to buy and even benchmark a NAS. This time we'll move into even deeper waters and tell you how to build your own Storage Area Network. Simply put, a storage area network is nothing but a high-speed network with storage devices, like NAS boxes or even PCs with free hard drive space connected to it. All these storage devices will appear as one large pool of storage to everyone outside this network. Therefore, you'll be able to allocate storage from this pool to your servers and applications. One benefit of doing this is scalability. You can expand this storage pool whenever you need by adding more storage devices to it. Moreover, since it's a network dedicated for storage, it reduces overheads and improves data I/O. In this article, we'll tell you how to build such a scalable storage-network.
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Direct Hit!
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Applies To: Storage managers
USP: Buid a low-cost IP SAN, with ordinary H/w and easily available S/w
Primary Link: http://tinyurl.com/27fdx3
Google Keywords: iSCSI, Linux
On CD:PCQXtreme System/labs /iscsitarget-0.4.14.tar.gzSCSI Refesher |
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The building blocks
The requirements for building your own SAN are simple. You need machines with hard drives or NAS boxes, preferably with a Linux based OS. These would form the storage pool, so the machines must have large hard drives to give you lots of capacity. In SAN lingo, all of these machines are called targets. You'll need to connect them to a Gigabit Ethernet switch, so that you have high-speed connectivity between them. You'll also need another machine with Windows 2003 Server, which will act as the controller. This should have two network cards, one going to the Gigabit Ethernet switch, and the other connecting to your LAN. In SAN lingo, this server is called the Initiator. You'll also need the iSCSI target and initiator software that needs to be installed on the respective machines.
Setting up the storage pool
Take any Linux distribution and install it on all the PCs that you intend to use for your storage pool. We used Fedora 6 Linux on all target machines and installed it with the development tools option selected. Everything else should be deselected, thereby giving a minimal install. During the installation, you need to partition the hard drive on the target. First create a root partition of 8 GB for the FC 6 OS, create another one GB for the SWAP partition, and dedicate the remaining space to /usr/local. This will be used as a part of the storage pool, also known as the iSCSI target. Before installation, note down the partition that you have dedicated for the iSCSI target. In our case, it was /dev/hda2. As all target machines are sitting on an isolated network, assign them a fixed IP address each and note it down. Next, go to this month's PCQuest CD and take the iSCSI target software.
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Alternately, you can also download it from http://tinyurl.com/2l4nhd. The file is called iscsitarget-0.4.14.tar. Copy it to your FC 6 machine in a separate folder in /usr/local and issue the following commands:
# tar -zxvf iscsitarget-0.4.14.tar
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