The Quest for the Perfect Cloud Storage

[Alan Johnson]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:

> I had run the VMs on an ESXi server with the same NFS server.  From what
> I've read, for gigabit ethernet, NFS vs iSCSI speed is a  wash.  VMware ESXi
> will hapily use either.
>

I was thinking about paying for VMWare ESXi until I found XenServer was
mostly free now, and better IMHO, at least on paper (or pixels?).  Plus, I'm
already fairly well versed on Xen.

>
> For multisystem access, NFS works.  A SAN like iSCSI/FibreChannel/etc needs
> a clustering filesystem that's much harder to setup.
>

If it is simpler to deal with once it is setup than ZFS/FreeBSD/VM solutions
I described, I'm interested, especially since I can probably get money to
pay some one to help me set it up.

>
> I've run Sun QFS over 2GB FibreChannel.  It's faster then NFS over gigabit
> of course.
>

FWIIW, I'm specing a 10 GigE networking plain mostly dedicated to storage.
I might get 2 for redundancy and extra capacity but talk about $$?  10 GigE
switches still ain't cheap.  The 10 GigE is mostly to support puting some of
our lighter load database servers in the cloud, so I might even fall back to
putting them on dedicated boxes and dropping the cloud storage network  to
1Gig.

>
> I've often wondered why some sysadmins use an iSCSI backend with a NAS
> front end.
>

I don't understand that line, but I'm not sure I need to. =)
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