[Question] MSA1000. 2 servers, 1 workstation and shared storage

[Jerry Meszaros]

Yup, another first poster looking for help...

First off a little background. I've never been formally trained in anything more than typical home and small business networking so forgive me if I use wrong terminology but I will try to explain exactly what I have and what I want. Perhaps I can learn more from you guys. However I do feel a little background is relevant. I've been using HP servers for a number of years now for my in-home servers and managed to get my hands on a MSA500. Several months of owning it, I went ahead and converted it successfully to an MSA1000. The SAN 2/6 Fiber switch I managed to get which led me to wonder if I can connect more than one machine and share a logical drive. So, can I share an MSA1000 logical drive on 3 machines? I know each machine can see it, but I do know that giving multiple machines block level access to one volume leads to data corruption.

What I would like to do, is allow all 3 machines, or at least 2 of them to share the single logical volume on the MSA1000. I've tried goolging "shared filesystem" and "clustered file system" but pretty much all those results talk about duplicating stuff across different machines such has having identical copies locally, I don't want that. I want a single copy on a single storage device (MSA1000).

My configuration:

MSA1000

12) 147GB (RAID ADG, 1.33TB) "GLaDOS"

MSA Fabric Switch 6 (gadzoox), which is now "unsupported" as far as I know

Server 1 & 2

Proliant DL380 G2

Server 2003

4GB RAM

QLA2340 FC HBA (pci-x 133)

Workstation (current machine using MSA1000)

Custom built PC (AMD quadcore, 990FX Sabertooth)

Windows XP

8GB RAM (3.2GB, using 32bit presently)

QLE2360 FC HBA (pci express 4x)

Thanks in advance for some pointers.