[TriLUG] SAN file locking

[Andrew Blum]

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 15:14 -0800, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
This is my original problem/question: I saw it from the
> viewpoint of filelocking, but the bigger picture is who owns
> the blocks?
>
I think what might help is to understand zoning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_Channel_zoning

When you ask about 'ownership', it will be good to understand zoning in a
SAN.  Remember a SAN is a Storage Area Network.  This means that many
systems could potential 'see' ALL the disks;  But, when you are considering
which system has 'permission' to access a LUN, this is typically handled
through zoning.

Hope this helps with your understanding.

On an aside but related to this thread.  There might be an alternative to
consider to your SAN vs NFS server storage options.  Check out GlusterFS (
http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Main_Page)  which
presents a single NFS share (or client GlusterFS) but from distributed
servers on a per file (rather than block) basis.  These distrubuted servers
can have any local filesytem they wish to share.  Gluster was recently
acquired by Redhat (http://www.redhat.com/promo/storage/) and is being
distributed as Red Hat Storage Software Appliance.

Thanks for the great thread.

Andrew Blum