SAN woes

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Robert La Ferla wrote:
> I have a client who has a EMC SAN...with both NTFS 
> and HFS+ partitions on it.  Problem is, the Windows clients cannot see 
> the HFS+ partitions and the Mac OS X clients can read but not write to 
> the NTFS partitions.
> 
> I am wondering if there is some way we can get the Windows clients to 
> see the HFS+ partitions.  Ideas?

You could turn the SAN into a NAS by inserting a UNIX or Linux box (or 
cluster of them) in the middle, and have it export a network file 
system, thus making the file system on the SAN transparent to the client 
machines.

But presumably there is a reason why the company chose a SAN rather than 
a NAS in the first place. The NAS approach may not meet the performance 
requirements.

Another theoretical approach would be to use an open source file system 
on the SAN that can be fully supported by all the client machines. For 
example, I've found that it is far easier to get Windows machines to 
support EXT2 file systems[1] than to get Linux machines to support the 
proprietary NTFS. I don't know, but I'm betting there is EXT2 support 
available for OS X.

Also, in the past year there have been some significant strides made in 
support of NTFS for Linux (drivers that can reliably write to NTFS and 
supposedly with good performance)[2][3]. It might be worth checking to 
see where that currently is at, and whether anyone is working on porting 
it to OS X.

  -Tom

1. http://www.fs-driver.org/
2. 
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=23836054&forum_id=2697
3. http://www.linux-ntfs.org/

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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