Reply to rant: [olug] server life span

[David Walker]

Thanks for the excellent explanation.  I now realize that I need one.  Which 
one do you recommend.  I am, of course, interested in price, performance, 
redundancy, and the ability to manage it easily through the command line or a 
web interface.

On Friday 27 September 2002 09:47 am, olug-admin at olug.org wrote:
> A SAN (Storage Area Network) moves the physical storage from the server to
> a central appliance.  The server gets a fibrechannel card which appears to
> the OS as a SCSI controller.  The FC card connects to the SAN appliance
> which presents to the server OS x-number of virtual disks.  With some SAN's
> you can even have boot bios on the FC card to allow for the server to be
> completely diskless.
>
> The advantage of a diskless server is that you can swap out the server
> hardware without losing your OS and data.  Just pull the FC card, replace
> the server, put the FC card in the new server and turn it on.  Your done.
>
> The real strength of a SAN is that you can manipulate your disks without
> disturbing your data or taking your servers offline.   You can resize,
> mirror, swap, and add disks without your users knowing anything.  Some SAN
> appliances even allow you to upgrade your disks in the array without taking
> it offline.
>
> Bill
>
> ***********Reply separator*************
>
>
>
>                       "Don E. Kauffman"
>                       <dkauffman at tconl.        To:       olug at olug.org
>                       com>                     cc:
>                       Sent by:                 Subject:  Re: Reply to rant:
> [olug] server life span olug-admin at olug.o
>                       rg
>
>
>                       09/26/2002 04:31
>                       PM
>                       Please respond to
>                       olug
>
>
>
>
>
>
> For those of us who are in the newbie category. what's a SAN? How is it
> different than a normal server / network?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Don
>
> O
>
>
>
>
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