Have any one had any experience of using HP-UX with NAS?

[ericfjchen]

Can you share your experience of using HP-UX with NAS? Why did you choose NAS?

[Jeff Schussele]

Well, not personally, but second-hand from a fellow SA I've heard that the way LUNs are presented to the system is antithetical to what we normally see - i.e. he expected a "set" of normal size LUNs but was presented with one big 200GB LUN. I'll have to look at the system & talk to the Storage team to see what's going on. NAS is just now entering our environment in the mid-range arena & the reason is purely $. We're terming it 2nd tier storage - whereas SANs are 1st tier. More later.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Dave Olker]

Hi,

Just a point of clarification:

Are you asking about experiences with HP-UX systems as the NAS head (i.e. an HP-UX server fronting a SAN or a dedicated array), or HP-UX systems as a "client" accessing data from a remote NAS, using either NFS or CIFS?

Thanks,

Dave

[Shaikh Imran]

Hi,
I had earlier used Third Party NAS.
with our n-class.But we faced performance
problems.So, we migrated to Clarrion EMC i.e.
SAN.
I don't know about the alternate path or powerpath
exist in NAS or not but this exists in SAN.

My Personal feelings:
NAS devices after all are NFS based for HPUX
while SAN devices seems to be something internal ( not physically, But ...) .
If a application is i/o intensive then i think SAN is best.
But if you just want a external storage with say 50% effective i/o then.
whereas the same with SAN may give you 75%.
There are always limitations if you use NFS --very very personal.

Regards,

[Hoefnix]

Hi,

We are using both NAS and SAN for our HP-UX systems.
At the moment we use NFS(for HP-UX) to our NAS systems.
The NAS systems we are using also support iSCSI and this seems to be supported in HP-UX and in the comming weeks we will test this in a test-cluster.

As far as I investigated it, with iSCSI the storage is presented as a DISK(LUN) (like SAN) and if you have 2 interfaces in the NAS it must be possible to have alternate path's as well, but keep in mind I did not test it yet.

I know the discussion will stay, when are you talking about SAN and NAS and how to place iSCSI in this picture.
We are using NAS from NetApp and that is mainly for the $$$$.

HTH,

Peter Geluk

[Shaikh Imran]

hi,

You will get more info on SAN Vs NAS
Here:
http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/sanvsnas/

Regards,

[Mark Ellzey]

Howdy,

We use a Network Appliance, with a J200 NIS server as a front end. Works great. If I/O will be a problem, then I definitely agree that a SAN is the way to go. For a NAS setup, it's just a matter of configuring the LUNS on the storage device in a manner that makes sense to you.

On our NetApp, we have various LUNS set up as different directories, and these are subsequently exported from the J200. The NIS clients mount these directories via automount when required.

We very seldom have a problem with the NetApp. Most problems we have come from the NIS setup on the client, or physical network problems (i.e. bad cable, bad port on switch, wrong speed/duplex setup).

Regards,
Mark