SAN setup - multiple machines

[Ali, Saqib]

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

You can't do that either.

> 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.

It will be slow. But I have never seen an application that was slow
because of the NFS. At my university I used to manage Objectivity
(true OO database) with data in tera-bytes. I did tests with directly
connecting to the disk array, vs Objectivity DB files served over NFS.
The difference was negligible.

Maybe something is mis-configured. Also take a look at AFS (the IBM
version). It might offer you better performance, but is certainly not
cheap.

saqib
http://www.linkedin.com/in/encryption