My own initial ideas are the following though I’m in early research on the topic.
Between SAN and iSCSI the latter is probably prefered for speed and security. I’m mostly basing this on speed as I’m not sure what platform iSCSI would require on the storage side or if it can be managed purely as a hardware appliance function.
Between SAN/Windows and SAN/Unix, my initial feeling is the latter also.
– higher potential security in the Unix host OS
– better use of resources in the Unix host OS
– minimal Unix install requiring only the SAN application dependencies
In skimming a whitepaper on SAN/Windows the points raised for the first option above are the following:
– Windows memory management catches hidden memory errors
– Windows provides deterministic interrupt processing (aka. real-time processing)
– Unix like OS must have SAN vendor kernel modifications to provide close to real-time processing required for 400, IOPS processing. This can also introduce undocumented issues which can only be fixed by the vendor when discovered.
These are not measured facts as I have to read up on the various solutions further. What have others found in adding SAN solutions? Has anyone run on top of Windows and Unix host platforms or compared SAN and iSCSI options?
