This is one thing I've been asked for a few times; the problem is that
NAS systems have their own filesystem on the NAS head, then present
the files of that filesystem out via NFS or CIFS (or whatever file- based protocol).

A fiber channel interface only knows how to speak blocks (via SCSI
commands); so there has to be a driver on top of that to implement a
filesystem (ext3, NTFS, CVFS, etc). Additionally, while the NAS head
manages competing requests for the same blocks, there's nothing like
that when you talk to a disk via Fiber Channel -- the disk will
happily take a write from one system that overwrites a change just
made by a different system. If one system decides to put a file where
the previous system just extended a directory entry, then your
filesystem is corrupt.

Even NDMP over fiber channel is similar; the NDMP server (which
understands the filesystem's layout) is telling the NDMP tape device
to read blocks in a particular order from the disk.

The only way for BlueArc, NetApp, etc. to present the same view of a
volume via fiber channel or iSCSI that they do via NFS or CIFS would
be if they: a) released a windows/linux/mac/whatever driver that implements WFS or
WAFL, their on-disk filesystem type, and b) set up these drivers and the NAS head to know how to communicate to
make sure that only one system is modifying a disk block at any one
time (which CVFS/StorNext handles for you).

It gets to be a can of worms, and (at least for now) if you need fiber
channel access to disk for multiple clients, StorNext seems to be the
best combination of FCP-and-network access, since you can connect an
FCP client to the filesystem, and have it re-serve the filesystem via
NFS, CIFS, or StorNext LAN client. There's also filesystem software
like (I think) GPFS, Lustre, and others, that I think do similar
things to StorNext/CVFS, but I haven't explored those too much.

If there are other and better options, I'd love to hear about them --
anything to make the bits move faster. }:>

-Sven

On Mar 8, 2010, at 3:18 PM, J. J. Franzen wrote:

Actually, do any of the big guys (Netapp, Isilon, etc.) allow direct
FC access to their volumes? I know Blue Arc does not and am curious
if anyone else does. I would so love to do away with NDMP for my
backups and be able to do true incremental backups like in the good
ol days...

J^2

On Mar 8, 2010, at 3:18 PM, Ian Haskin wrote:

We're a small TV-commercial shop (3D/compositing, 20 people, with
50 or so machines, incl. 4 flames) that is outgrowing our home-built Linux
NAS. I'm looking for something scalable with high-bandwidth links for our
compositing nodes, with a tie-in to the rest of our 3D 1Gb-ethernet network.

-----Original Message----- From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com [mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss- bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com] On Behalf Of Barry Robison Sent: March-08-10 5:18 PM To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: Re: Researching: Isilon and alternatives

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Ian Haskin ian@topixfx.com wrote: > I've been looking into Isilon storage and I'm quite impressed with
> their > sales-pitch. Can anyone share their experiences with Isilon
> products or any > other products that compete/compare with them? >

Hi Ian,

What is your budget and expected workload?

We evaluated both Isilon and BlueArc, with BlueArc winning our business. For our expected artist count (200) and farm size ( ~6k cores ), we liked BA better. We were sold on the data tiering, disaster recovery, and throughput the hardware architecture allows. From other shops we heard that BA was the only thing saturating
10GbE. We had issues getting Isilon working on 10GbE at all...

At a previous facility I worked at we used a small Isilon cluster ( 4 nodes ) quite happily. I think when you get up to the number of nodes ( and accelerator nodes ) you need for a large cluster, some problems can be expected.

Good luck, -Barry _ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

---

StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss