Author: Luc Nieland

A SAN build with opensource software and industry standard hardware... Is that really possible?

This is 2009, local storage is outdated for years. Also for years there are many suppliers of good SAN products. High quality products but not very affordable and they usualy come in black boxes full of specialised hardware and firmware. Unix/Linux proves that it can be usefull for many purposes by providing alternatives based on open standards.

In this presentation, a scenario is presented for a fully operational setup. The result is a high avaliable SAN without a single point of failure. This is done with a stack of industry standard hardware, ethernet and opensource software. The software is based on Linux, Drbd, iSCSI and multipathing. This software gives many options while building together, and the configuration has to be done carefully. The result can be used in many situations, from large enterprises to SME environments.