SAN for beginners

Hi All,

I need to add some about 10TB of storage to our infrasturce and went 
along to an storage exhibition to find out what was available. The 
biggest grey area for me was the filesystem and management. Without 
being too open-ended, I want to get some idea of what Linux-based 
solution I could use. All the manufacturers I talked to had no idea 
about how to manage and share their products unless they were Windows 
based even though they claim to support Linux.

I had been presuming I would install the SAN gateway and the storage 
arrays, use LVM for the filesystem and Samba to share the data to 
Windows user and install Fibre-Channel cards to the other 3 servers 
that need access to the data. However I think that there is more to 
it than that and I could use some help understanding how it all hangs 
together and what (Linux) options there are. If there servers are to 
see the storage as block devices I imagine there is some proprierty 
software needed for the OS's. 

Currently I use FC4 on my servers and the are about 40 Windows users 
that need to access the data as well.

Any thoughts or advice is much appreciated.
Thanx,
Dp.



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