SAN setup - multiple machines

[Nilesh Bansal]

Hi all,

We have 6 machines with SAN setup. All 6 machines are connected to a
SANBox via fiber cable. The SAN hosts a 2TB partition (user home
directories) which is visible as a local hard drive (/dev/sdd) on all
the 6 machines. This partition from is mounted on one of the machines,
which is then exported to rest of 5 machines using NFS.

My question: Is there a reason why the SAN hosted partition can not be
mounted by multiple machines. Our setup was done by another sysad who
has left, and I am have no experience managing SAN. Is it a common
practice to mount SAN partition on one machine and then export it to
others via NFS (which to me looks counter intuitive). Are there any
locking issues (files being modified simultaneously) than SAN can not
handle.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks
Nilesh