[Discuss] Storage question follow-up

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:34:59PM -0500, Peter Jalajas wrote:
> Great iPv6 talk Wednesday night, thanks, Dan Hagerty!
> I've dabbled with Sixxs/aiccu if I can help anyone with my miniscule experience:
> $ ping6 -qc 10 ipv6.google.com
> PING ipv6.google.com(vb-in-x63.1e100.net) 56 data bytes
> --- ipv6.google.com ping statistics ---
> 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9012ms
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 69.100/71.419/78.722/2.824 ms
> 
> I wasn't fully prepared to ask my storage question Wed. night.  I've
> now tried to draw a picture of my situation/concept in google docs:
>   http://goo.gl/K98JN
> I hope that better explains what I'm trying to do.  I'm guessing it's
> fairly easy to implement, if I just knew which of the several
> closely-related tools to use.  I'm hoping someone can look at that
> diagram and say, "Oh, I see what you're trying to do.  Go with
> <Tool-X>, that does exactly what you're trying to do".  I'd prefer to
> use Linux (Ubuntu).  Our problem is storage of 100s of xGB video
> files, and file-directory management. I want to be able to present an
> "N Drive" CIFS/SMB share to the users, under which they'll be able to
> easily drill down to their files; and on the back-end, to be able to
> efficiently use the NAS boxes we have, and simply add more NAS boxes
> (or other device type you recommend) to the ethernet switch as we fill
> up the old ones.  Or something like that.  I'll worry about bandwidth
> and backup of the bit pile later...

Recommendation #1: you have a fileserver that mounts the
filesystems exported by the backends. Do not use SMB/CIFS for
the export from the backends. Use AoE or iSCSI or another
block-level protocol. Then the clients can use SMB/CIFS to 
talk to your fileserver.

Recommendation #2: no matter what you do, reliability/redundancy
needs a clean field to work from. There's no sense of your needs
here.

-dsr-