Cluster NAS?

PiKe · 17 Jul 2006 at 15:18

Hi, Is it possible with Windows 2003 Server to have multiple NAS's attached and have windows cluster them so that they appear as one drive?

Curiosityx · 17 Jul 2006 at 16:40

No you would need a SAN if you wanted to implement shared storage. You could connect multiple NAS boxes to your LAN and setup shares from the server pointing to locations on the NAS boxes though.

Ricochet J · 17 Jul 2006 at 16:47

As said above. Clustering NASs in my eyes would mean you'd need some sort of LAN RAID which i've never seen before in my years of netoworking.

PiKe · 18 Jul 2006 at 09:56

Well I think I've found a solution to clustering NAS in the way of Distributed File System.

Would this work as I want it to?

PiKe · 18 Jul 2006 at 12:35

Ok DFS won't work because you can't have 2 link names the same.

I need storage that's easily upgradable but I need to ability to combine all the drives into one. RAID is the obvious solution but it's not easily upgradable, you would need to restore the array in order to upgrade.

Has anyone any suggestions?

PiKe · 18 Jul 2006 at 18:19

We have a solution, external firewire hard drives, converted to dynamic, then spanned

zetec452 · 18 Jul 2006 at 18:58

Why can't you buy a NAS / SAN drive without fully populating it with drives. Then when you need to increase the array buy some more drives?

I couldn't imagine external drives being anyware near as good as a NAS / SAN box, never mind the reliability factors.

Edit: Something like this:

Need more room. Add more drives.

JonnyT · 18 Jul 2006 at 20:20

Take a look at Datacore SANmelody - does pretty much all you're looking for including iSCSI support, dynamically resized partitions etc.

Datacore

Curiosityx · 18 Jul 2006 at 23:59

PiKe said:
We have a solution, external firewire hard drives, converted to dynamic, then spanned

Very very bad idea, what is it your trying to do anyway and what type of data are you looking at storing?

If you were going to do it properly which you should specially if its for a production environment is too used either fiber attached SAN's or ISCSI preferably using something from the HP Storageworks range.

Using Windows software raid to span multiple external attached disks is utter madness to be fair.

PiKe · 19 Jul 2006 at 11:24

We haven't got the money to do it properly at the moment.

zetec452 · 19 Jul 2006 at 11:31

I'd rather have a pc with a few 500gig drives over raid 5 than those external drvies. Pop linux on it and you've got a fairly decent nas kind of thing.

MarkB2k1 · 19 Jul 2006 at 15:08

A SAN would be the best bet.

Fibre attached devices plugged into a Fibre Switch, shared by multiple servers using the same pool of storage.

SAN's allow you to dynamically expand / upgrade the storage pool without impacting access for the machines that are currently linked to them.

I play with these configurations daily, and they are very neat peices of technology