We are hoping to finally get round to installing a storage server that supports iscsi targets.
We had been looking at various open source and proprietary systems. Our favoured OSS product was Openfiler. This offers good integration with AD, iscsi targets and good snapshot support and fail over. I have also recently come accross NexentaStor which implemtents the zfs filesystem, deduplication of files and iscsi targets.
I am looking for schools that have or are interested in implementing an OSS storage network to share experience testing, documentation and risk :)
Thanks,
Tim
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Dislike replying to my own thread but in the vague chance that anyone is interested in storage related OSS products I will provide a brief update.
I installed a NexentaStor community edition server as a VM, to test the dedup functionality and isci target. Glad to say it worked as expected and that the deup functionality would save considerable space on our staff data volumes. The web front end to the system is well designed and easy to navigate.
NextenStor also has some UK based official support partners that provide commercial support for NexenStor. I am currently working with them to get quotes to compare prices,throughput,capacity and functionality againt the commericial SAN/NAS options from NetApp, SUN, Dell and HP. As the SAN(s) are going to be responible for running some key systems I am tempted to get commercial support for the hardware and software combined. I also see this commerical support as providing in house training on configuring and maintaining the SAN. We still have a SAN that is based on an OSS OS as well :)
Will update this thread again when I get some final details on pricing, throughput, functionality et al.
Anyone care to share experiences of using SAN technologies to run VMs, filesystems, backups etc. Did they live up the salesperson hype :)
Tim