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How do LEB providers build their SAN? Buy commercial products or build with free software?
chihcherng
Veteran
SAN is needed for some virtualization applications like live migration. Because LEB providers obviously need to keep their cost down, I wondered how they build their SAN infrastructure. Buying commercial products like NetApp sounds expensive to me. Is it possible to build an SAN with Openfiler or Solaris alike? If so, how does it perform?
Comments
@StylexNetworks is using SAN with Onapp I think.
For OpenVZ live migration SAN is not necessary.
I doubt many LEB providers use any sort of SAN. I think @prometeus has one, but he has it from before, didn't buy it to start offering LEBs out of it.
Yes, last year I used the old fiber channel san with some nodes. Maintenance for that expired, all the spare disks were in use so I decided to get out of production it :-)
We are also using one of our Coraid AOE SRX for some vps. In both cases of course SANs were used because they were in place :P
SAN isn't often a smart choice. It's often the single point of failure and due to the complexities the thing that fails the most. Amazon AWS more often than not fails at the SAN level each time it dies.
Care to back that up with some facts?
Completely disagree. A proper SAN should not have any single point of failure - frames, controllers, switches, disks, etc.. The good stuff - Hitachi, EMC, IBM, etc. - does not at any point. Of course, you won't be serving LEBs off it :-)
The only SPOF for a SAN is the administrator, which admittedly is a problem, though that's true of anything you let humans touch.
I don't think AWS uses SAN. I know Azure does not and I think their architecture is very similar.
I'm not saying SANs have single point of failure. I am saying THE SAN IS the single point of failure. As in looking at the complete system, it is the SAN that fails out of anything.
They do. Read up on a few storms where they crashed and most of the time the issue lies in the SAN in any recovery or automated 'cloud' infrastructure they have.
This is why Cloud Sigma go with distributed file system instead of a SAN.
http://www.cloudsigma.com/en/platform-details/our-infrastructure