Your storage solution must meet your basic file system management needs. In addition to the operating platform, servers store software and data. The primary challenge is to store the data efficiently while making it available to users when and where they need it. To simplify that task, your storage solutions should abstract diverse storage devices into a single logical storage space.
Storage solutions must be flexible and scalable. Flexibility lets you apply the storage solution to a variety of equipment. Scalability lets you continue to grow and adapt your solution as your business needs change.
The following table describes general storage requirements and OES solutions.
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Storage Requirement |
Novell OES Solution |
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Virtualized storage management: The ability to manage diverse storage devices from multiple vendors and to present the combined space as a single resource that you can subdivide and allocate according to your data management needs. |
Novell Storage Services (NSS) virtualizes the file storage to take advantage of all space available on disks. NSS supports a variety of storage device technologies and vendor products. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: NSS File System Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Flexibility: The ability to implement different storage solutions to meet a variety of workplace scenarios and to modify the storage solution easily as business needs change. |
NSS supports a variety of storage architectures, including direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS) servers, and storage area networks (SANs). For information, see the OES 11 SP3: NSS File System Administration Guide for Linux. NSS supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs that allow authorized access to any device in the SAN fabric and optimization of available storage. The Linux solution for iSCSI storage is available. For information about the iSCSI Target and iSCSI Initiator software, see Novell Cluster Services supports server clusters. Data for the cluster can be shared as DAS or in SANs. For information see the OES 11 SP3: Novell Cluster Services for Linux Administration Guide. |
OES is compatible with a wide variety of storage devices such as disk drives, JBOD (just-a-bunch-of-disks) arrays, RAID arrays, storage subsystems, tape drives, and tape libraries.
Storage devices can be SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SATA, or ATA/IDE, depending on your performance and reliability requirements. In general, SCSI devices are faster and more reliable than ATA devices. Today’s ATA devices can be used for primary and near-line storage, or as staging areas in a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strategy.
OES supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN solutions. In a Fibre Channel SAN, the SAN equipment and connections are based on Fibre Channel interconnect technologies. In an iSCSI SAN, the equipment and connections are based on conventional Ethernet and IP interconnect technologies.
For information about Linux POSIX file systems such as Btrfs, Ext3, Reiser and XFS, see Overview of Linux POSIX File Systems
in the OES 11 SP3: Linux POSIX Volume Administration Guide.
For more information about general storage solutions such as DAS, NAS servers, SANs, and clusters, see Storage Architectures.