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 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