Linux / Samba and SAN questions

[Paul Adams]

We currently have a NetWare/Windows mixed environment in our company (NetWare for authentication and file/printer sharing, Windows for Active Directory authentication, sync'd with NetWare).

Novell have been... erm... a little "awkward" lately, and we don't have much faith in their future, so we want to move into a full AD authentication environment.

But Windows file sharing sucks.

So we're looking at alternative file serving solutions (printing will be direct IP, so no need for print serving) which will integrate with AD authentication and work with Storage Area Networks.

Looking at Samba 3.0 as the performance in comparison with Windows appears to be a lot greater, integrates with AD and appears to be a regular set of Windows shared resources as far as the clients would be concerned.

I can't see any mention of clustered storage, but then Samba appears to run on top of UNIX/Linux, so I guess it's actually down to whether the OS itself supports SANs?


Is this assumption correct, and if so are there any preferred solutions for Linux that utilizes SANs and works with Samba 3.0 well?

If it makes a difference, it's about 1000 users split between a head office and 51 WAN-connected sites (roughly 50/50).

[Jiff Lemon]

Apples Xserve is where you should be looking.

(And yes, thats coming from me, a dedicated windows man!)

[youngteam]

Have you looked at FreeBSD?

I know it has drivers for Qlogic 2100, 2200, 2300, 2312 Fibre Channel SCSI controllers

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?q...SD+4.8-RELEASE

if that's what you're after