SAN setup - multiple machines

[Nilesh Bansal]

Thanks Saqib for your reply.

> > Are there any
> > locking issues (files being modified simultaneously) than SAN can not
> > handle.
> yup. You need something like NFS, AFS, GFS, Lustre, or DFS to allow
> multiple machines to access the same storage.

What happens if only one host mounts the storage for writing and all
other hosts are read-only.

In our application, the data is stored on one machine and is updated
often. This data is exported to other machines using NFS in a
read-only mode. The problem with NFS is that (I think) it is slow. I
would like to know if read performance from NFS on a gigabit lan is
equivalent to that from a locally attached disk. Our application,
basically a search engine, requires fast reads (iostat shows around
300 tps and 3000 block reads per second).

> May I ask why you want connect multiple machines to the same SAN
> slice? Is it for clustering?
The setup I mentioned was for user home directories.

thanks,
Nilesh Bansal.
http://queens.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/