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March 4th, 2011 04:00
Sharing LUNs across multiple physical servers
Hi all,
First post, so appologies if it's in the wrong section.
We have a CLARiiON CX4-120 which is managed by a 3rd party. I've heard may be possible to share the same LUN storage across multiple servers. I've not had much luck finding if this is possible or not through scan reading some of the products documentation.
If this is possible, do we need to worry about any configuration changes on the Windows Servers? For example, security permissions, if the storage is shared, local security I'm guessing won't work, but are there any other issues?
The idea behind this is, we have a product which uses servers as worker servers, so the app can tap in to the other servers if they are not being utilised and use the CPU's/RAM for it's processes. We are hoping that by creating a large LUN shared by all the servers, this will speed up the process, and consolidate the data as currently is all over the place.
Thanks
dynamox
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March 4th, 2011 04:00
to allow concurrent access to a LUN you have to have a file system that supports that, this one for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_General_Parallel_File_System
Allen Ward
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March 8th, 2011 13:00
I guess we missed answering the underlying question as well though. Once you get the technical aspects of the multiple access handled, the way you actually implement it is to add the host objects for all the servers to the same Storage Group on the CLARiiON. Normally you have a one to one mapping with a Storage Group containing one host object and the LUNs it can see. You can add multiple host objects though and all the hosts will be granted access to see those LUNs.
Just make sure you DON'T try this until you get the other issues addressed :-)
Allen Ward
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March 8th, 2011 13:00
Depending on what your servers are doing you might be able to simplify the configuration by just pointing multiple servers to the same data using a CIFS share. The performance certainly won't be the same as a direct FC connection, but some applications don't need that performance and just need intermittent access to the shared data.
Otherwise you will definately need to loo at some kind of software solution to account for the multiple host access. The most common use case for this would probably be server clusters. In that case the clustering software manages the access to ensure there is no contention. What you are talking about is a bit different, but the provider of the grid software that manages the computational load may be able to recommend a solution as well.