Re: Shared storage considerations, Fiber Channel, 10GbE or Thunderbolt?

Thank you Steve for sharing

[Steve Modica] "10Gb uses NAS protocols (like AFP and Samba) and files are accessed as files off of a server. It's easier to setup, simpler to understand and has only one server as a point of failure (which you can make redundant via LACP, dual power etc).

would you care to elaborate further? what other protocols that NAS usually support? what do you mean with dual power?
i'm also curious about the difference about 10GbE SFP+ (with copper or fibre cables) & 10GBASE-T (Cat6A) since i can't find a comparison of the two that states the pros & cons. i imagine a Cat6A would have a better durability & length factor. is it latency that makes SFP+ still preferred now?

i have been told that a certain company would release a NAS storage that has a dual 10GbE connection but not aggregated, it only uses the ports & cables as channels. They wrote their own filesystem as well, which is their main weakness point so far, since it means they have to write a driver for other OS in order to get those operating systems to recognize the storage/server filesystem (as proprietary system would). Otherwise their product is very much interesting aside the price, which is not released yet, i'm sure it isn't that expensive in terms of value, but it would still be quite a lot money since they have more than 50TB. i don't think it's wise for our company to buy it because of that, not in this stage anyway.

Fibre channel and iSCSI are not shared. The idea is that clients access the storage directly with a metadata server playing traffic cop. Everyone is diddling with the inode table via the metadata server. We've set these up with our iSCSI to test performance and compatibility (iSCSI 10Gb is faster than FC BTW). It's complicated. You have to have lots of LUNS to stripe together plus a metadata LUN that's mirrored"

i agree completely, this has been a great disadvantage for fibre, nightmare when there's a problem.