[cvsnt] CVSNT and Storage area networks

[Andreas Schweigstill]

Hi Andrew!

Andrew Corbett wrote:
 > In our case, I think the SAN will look like a network share.

No, a SAN is typically a Fibre Channel or iSCSI based network. The 
"shares" on a SAN are called volumes and are block oriented devices. 
 From a hosts view they nearly look like normal SCSI disks. A host can 
either put a normal file system like UFS, FFS, ReiserFS on such volumes 
or can use file system types which allow simultanous mounts from several 
hosts, like Sistina GFS. So a certain file system can be visible on 
multiple hosts without using NFS or Samba. The restriction which usually 
apply to Samba shares are not applicable here.

Databases often use their own file systems on SAN volumes; for some 
systems like Oracle there are also special features available, like 
addional parity and consistency checking on _volume_level_, e.g. EMC's
Double Checksum for Symmetrix (DMX):
http://www.emc.com/products/software.jsp

 > Does anyone have any experience with using cvsnt with a SAN?

Sometimes SAN is confused with NAS. It is also possible to build a NAS 
on a SAN, like EMC Celerra. The NAS server or gateway maps the SAN 
volumes to NFS or Samba shares, so here the restrictions for CVS usage 
may apply.

I also have started to migrate our disk storage to a SAN using an EMC 
Symmetrix 3930 but I don't have experience with CVSNT on it yet. I hope 
that it won't be affected by that migration. And I also must admit that 
our production server is still using CVS instead of CVSNT...

With best regards
Andreas Schweigstill

-- 
Dipl.-Phys. Andreas Schweigstill
CorTech A/S ZN Kiel, Sedanstrasse 14b, D-24116 Kiel, Germany
Phone: (+49) 431 1696-591, Fax: (+49) 431 1696-509
E-Mail: andreas.schweigstill at detewe.de