[Discuss] samba devices and RAID

[Noel Burton-Krahn]

Hi Peter,

No, I haven't set up ATAoE or drbd for that matter.  It'll be interesting to 
hear what works for you.  Reading about ATAoE, it looks like it's good for 
accessing a single disk over the network, but there's no concept of 
replicating data on multiple disks.  drbd does do disk replication, and all 
reads come from a local disk, which sounds good for a computing cluster with 
failover.

--Noel

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "pw" <p.willis at telus.net>
To: <noel at burton-krahn.com>; <discuss at vlug.org>
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2006 6:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Discuss] samba devices and RAID


> noel at natnix.com wrote:
>> The problem is the protocol stack you have to go through if you build
>> RAID on top of loopback files on top of Samba.  Consider a disk write:
>>
>> filesystem write -> loopback block device -> raid device <-> samba server
>>
>> keep in mind the raid device could do multiple block read/writes to your
>> samba server.
>>
>>
>> In drbd it would be:
>>
>> filesystem write -> drbd device <-> drbd server
>>
>> The SMB protocol itself is quite slow.  Hopefully drbd would be more
>> efficient, being designed for this kind of network RAID.
>>
>> --Noel
>>
>
> Have you done anything with ATA over ethernet?
>
> Peter
>