The document discusses building your own storage area network (SAN) using inexpensive commodity hardware. It describes what a SAN is and compares it to network attached storage. The author built their own SAN with three hard disks in a workstation running Solaris to provide 2.72TB of block storage across 20 virtual environments. By using ZFS and its snapshot and cloning capabilities, they were able to use just 750GB of space instead of the 12TB that would be required otherwise. The document encourages others to consider building their own low-cost SAN and provides resources for learning more.

1. Build your own SAN!
Sriram “Ram” Narayanan
Devops Engineer Thoughtworks
@sriramnrn
www.belenix.org

2. What is a SAN ?
Storage Area Network
Provides storage services
Block and file based storage
High fidelity storage
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

3. What is a NAS ?
Network Attached Storage
Usually file based storage services
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

4. What does a SAN look like ?
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance - 7320
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

5. SAN Vendors
HP
Sun/Oracle
IBM
NetApp
EMC
3Par
HP
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

6. SAN/NAS vs desktop sharing
Performance
Caching
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

7. The Engineering
Power supply
Read Write Cache engineering
Battery backups
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

8. SAN/NAS vs desktop sharing
Performance
Caching
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

9. Building your own SAN
Pros
Full Control
Low price
Good learning ground to understand
Build your own SAN!
SAN technologies @sriramnrn

10. Building your own SAN
What we did
Workstation
Three hard disk drives
Solaris 10 / OpenIndiana
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

11. Building your own SAN
Avoid Hardware RAID
ZFS gives it to you already
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

12. Building your own SAN
What we achieved
2.72 TB usable space
20 Environments of 600 GB each
Used 750 GB instead of 12 TB
Build your own SAN! to snapshots and clones)
(thanks @sriramnrn

13. Snapshots and Clones
Demo !
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14. Future directions
A basic box per office in India
DB Virtualization
SuperMicro base
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

15. ZFS Presentation
Let’s see the ZFS Presentation
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

16. Hands on !
Power on the VM
user/password
root/password123
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

17. Hands on !
Power on the VM
user/password
root/password123
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn

18. Want to know more ?
Bangalore Open Solaris User Group
(bosug)
Regular meetups
Project: Belenix
www.belenix.org
@belenix
Build your own SAN! @sriramnrn