Po' Man's SAN

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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I work for a fairly small company and am getting ready for our next
round of server upgrades (every 5-6 years whether we need it or not!).

I'd like to get some of the benefits of having a SAN (mainly one place
to add/manage raid-cards & HDDs), but don't really need the performance
or sticker-shock of the commercially available units.  Basically a big
chunk of SATA RAID storage I can share between a few systems (mail
server and a couple of file servers) would be ideal.

I'm currently thinking the ATA-over-Ethernet stuff looks like about the
right fit...no expensive fiber-channel, no accelerated TCP/IP cards
required for decent performance (the protocol is raw ethernet, no IP
involved).  I can start off with 'dedicated' storage areas for each
machine (using 'conventional' ext3/jfs/etc filesystems) , and graduate
to something like GFS in the future, if necessary.

I'd start out running over GigE copper, possibly bonding a couple
interfaces on the actual data server (or maybe even migrate to 10GigE)
if required for performance.

Has anyone setup anything like this, or played around with AoE?

Am I missing some obvious solution to doing the same thing without using
'exotic' technology like AoE, iSCSI, or <insert buzzword of the day>?

I know a bunch of you run linux on 'real' hardware, but my experience
has been limited mainly to the 32-bit x86 world, and software RAID [1|5]
+ LVM is about as fancy as we get.

Any comments/pearls of wisdom will be greatly appreciated!

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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