Yes, I realize there are tremendous hurdles. It will also take a vendor who builds their own solution ala Network Appliance, or even Sun. They would have to marry it to specific OS/hardware (Sun could "easily" do this, while Netapp would have to sell the internal fibre or SCSI card to go in the server as well as the disk arrays). All that aside, there would be no point if the current network technologies make it unnecessary to separate the two very different traffic requirements. I believe, though, that such an offering would hold tremendous value to large sites, particularly as virtual sites on the internet increase (many servers/services appearing as one).
-----Original Message----- From: tkaczma@gryf.net [mailto:tkaczma@gryf.net] Sent: Monday, March 29, 1999 5:55 PM To: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: RE: NAC SAN
On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Sam Schorr wrote:
Why not a box with a special OS (ala WAFL) that runs on what servers recognize as a fibre hub, intercepts the SCSI calls from all attached servers, and does all the nifty stuff needed to make the SAN(?) look like locally attached storage? Advantage? Separate file I/O from TCP session traffic but still allow file sharing in some form or another.
I thought about this, but if you really want to take it to the extreme, then the switch has to know exactly how it is used. Imagine any "erver" box that uses mirroring or striping. Unless you know exactly how data is placed you won't be able to recognize how the filesystem looks. Then there is caching. Usually systems don't worry about cache coherency on locally attached storage. The assume (fairly correctly too) that they are the only ones using the storage.
Tom