When it's time for serious file and just general data storage we have to take a look at more robust
methodologies and that's what this episode's all about.
In this episode I want to talk about network attached storage and as Big Brother storage area networking.
So both of these technologies are designed to store data.
However they do it in very different ways.
Now anybody who's ever used a computer is probably right clicked on a folder and shared it.
And that type of stuff and that's great.
But what I'm talking about is having dedicated systems dedicated systems that only share data.
That's their only job.
So sure I can take a Windows laptop and have it share all my critical company data.
But there's reasons I don't want to do that.
I want to use something that's more robust.
So I want to be able to do stuff like put in a good RAID array and put it in solid backup methodologies
and all that type of stuff.
And that's really what we're talking about here so let's go and get started with the smaller of the
two network attached storage.
NHS is a file based sharing protocols so an NHS box itself has got to look something like this so they
tend to be a smaller box and inside this box could be a bunch of raided drives whatever you might want
to do.
You might want to set that up and it's also usually running some type of very tight operating system.
Linux is not at all uncommon for these types of boxes.
OK so if we've got this box set up and if it's working at a file level that means that we will have
to access this nest box.
We will have to create the partitions or set set it up powered by B.
We're going to have to format all the drives and then we're going to have to set up the NHS to share
it via whatever protocol we want to share.
So if it's Samba we're going to set up a samba share if it's Apple protocol we're going to set up an
apple share whatever it might be.
The important thing that you need to get in your head is that an NHS First of all it's got to run over
your regular network so they run over Ethernet.
Just great.
They're going to be using TZP IP the whole shebang but they're going to be using well-known protocols
and they will manifest as shares in your network just like anything else.
So everything is done on the box.
Now luckily for you I have a wonderful tool right here in front of me called Free and.
I've went ahead and I got a system built up and I have a 2 terabyte hard drive that I'm currently sharing.
So this is a free NHS.
You'll see it actually has a web interface that's very convenient.
And this guy is on my network.
And what you'll see right now is I have created what they call a pool and this pool consists of exactly
one hard drive.
And then I've taken that hard drive and I split it up into two volumes and a volume and a say in volume.
Now if you look at this you'll see 1.9 to be bits and 900 give me bits.
Hey wait a minute.
Isn't that more than two.
That's right.
These guys take advantage of compression tools and things like that.
So they'll actually manifest larger capacity than the physical capacity of the drive itself so that's
convenient is free as is called free NHS.
But it's actually kind of like free NHS and essay end so we're going to hang on to the sand part for
a minute.
So even though it's called freeness it can really do both just fine.
So it makes these volumes or I actually made these volumes pre-made them ready to go.
Now what I need to do is then go about sharing them.
So on this particular system I want to make a Windows share.
So I'm going to come down here and let's take a look with shares I have.
I don't have any right now so I'm going to add one.
So first off I'm going to say what do I want to share.
And the way I've configured this any volume it knows that I want to share it that way so I'm going to
go ahead and say yes I want to share that and hit OK.
I have to give it a sharing.
There we go.
So this is the volume.
And then this is the actual Samba sharing that will show up on the network
cool.
So you can see that I have this share right now ready to rock and roll so the best thing I can do is
actually show it to you and I'm going to do that simply by opening up my file explore on my system my
messy messy file explore.
I'm going to go down to network here.
And we're going to give him a second because he's going to be scanning my network and let's see what
he finds
school right here do you see it.
So here's a test.
NASS So that's actually my next box or I'm going to double click on that.
And there's the share that I just made.
Now right now this is empty but I could go ahead and start putting stuff in taking stuff out.
It's up to the free NHS tool to create proper permissions.
Anything that I want for that in this case I left it wide open just so you could see it.
But it works exactly like that.
It just shows up as a share on my network.
Now any guesses are very very popular specially for smaller networks for work groups that type of stuff
that gives you a simple box.
It works on top of your existing network in the road to the easy to use and they're very very powerful.
However sometimes you need to take it up a click and in that case we go to storage area networks.
Now if you want to get cool when it comes to data storage your best buddy is storage area networks or
Sands now sains are big deals.
A San relies on some kind of technology to transfer data between your system and the storage itself.
Work at the block level.
When we get this all set up you're not going to be seeing networked shares folks.
You're going to be going into dismantlement and you get to see new hard drives that weren't there before.
So sand's are very powerful for boot functionality for storing data all kinds of things like that.
Sand's had been around for quite a while and the best sand's arguably ran on a type of technology called
fiber channel.
Now fiber channel has its own little network but not for the TZP IP stuff.
It was just to move data around the fiber channel is still out there it's still pretty popular and it's
wildly expensive so to make Fiber Channel work the first you'd have to do is plug a host busted Apter
into your computer and you still keep your neck.
You would need an HB.
I don't have one on me.
Here's a picture of one right here.
So these HPH I mean they look like a fiber optic network card and they pretty much are but they're not
running either and they're running their own language called fiber channel.
So all these guys would run into a fiber channel switch and then the fiber channel switch would run
to a fiber channel controller in a server room and then you'd have zillions and zillions of hard drives
and they're all under the control of all this so a sans setup can and will easily cost you in the hundreds
of thousands of dollars range.
It's very very expensive.
But boy oh boy is it powerful it is absolutely amazing.
So I've just pulled up here on.
I did a little google search on fiber channel and so you get an idea of the prices.
These are just the little host adapters individually and there's a switch right there for you for only
about $12000.
Now what I want you to look here is you see Ritz's like 16 gigabyte 8 gigabyte.
Those are the actual speeds that fiber channel runs at.
So Fiber Channel came out originally like one gigabit per second which years ago was pretty fast.
The cool part now is that we have a lot of Ethernet networks that can be running at around 10 gigs or
something like that.
So while Fiber Channel is still popular in fact Fiber Channel goes up to like 128 gigs now what we're
seeing is a poor man's version of say in technology called I scuzzy I guess he basically uses your existing
network and allows you to interconnect to different devices on top of your existing network.
And it allows you to work at an ice block level so it's pretty powerful.
So what I want to do right now is let's go back to Frean ass and actually set up a quick ice Gazi.
OK.
So here we are back in Frean ass and you'll see right here I've created what's called a SAN volume.
Now that's a little bit of a misnomer here because one of the most powerful aspects of a Sam and something
you cannot do with an NHS is let's say I've got a big pile of drives in my storage area all under the
control of a say in what I can do is I can just cut a chunk of it out.
Doesn't matter.
I can adjust the size whatever I want.
I'm going to go I'm going to get the this one for terabytes or whatever it might be it could be under
rated.
Beneath that everything's running but I can create what's known as an extent which basically says I'm
going to cut this chunk o data storage out of my sand and then I'm going to give it to somebody else
who will make it one of their hard drives.
So I've really created a say in volume.
You'll see it says 1.9 to be bytes available.
But this guy I just happened to cut that much out of the harddrive.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go into Frean ass and I'm going to go ahead and connect
it.
Now before I do that what you have in any ICSE network is what we call a initiator and a target.
So what we're going to do on the Free-Net side is we're going to create a target we're going to take
that volume I created and we're going to make it a target.
That target will get a basically a very specific ICSE type name.
And then I'm going to go into my Windows system right on this computer right here and built into pretty
much every operating system is what we call and I see as the initiator the I guess the initiator will
go out look for targets and then go ahead and make it one of their hard drives so let's start off by
making our target so just as a reminder we have our pre-made volume called the sand volume right now.
What we need to do is first of all we're going to have to go through a couple of steps here.
First of all we're after to make what we call the extent.
So we're going to take a chunk of the standby.
In fact I'm going to go and take the whole thing and I'm going to create an extent with some type of
name then I'm going to create some type of target.
So the target is going to in essence set up a lot of authentication issues in my setup.
There really is no authentication so going to the target and then going to the extent that I'm going
to put them together as a group.
And once that happens they'll be offered up for anybody to access that has the right kind of permissions.
All right.
So to get all this happening we're going to have to head down here to ice Gazi.
So the first thing I want to do is let's take a look at our targets.
OK.
Right now we don't have any targets.
I'm going to add a target and I'm going to call the target share.
And this is just authentication information that I had set up earlier and I can do all kinds of authentication
stuff within I scuzzy But that's made all right.
So the next hour I want to do is I want to go down to my extenso take a look at our extents.
We don't have anything.
So what I'm gonna do now is we're going to grab a chunk of that sand volume I made and I'm going to
call him sand X T A and B.
And you'll see that freeness has already seen that he's going to grab from that and I could change that
if I wanted to and really has nothing else to do here other than just hit OK.
So I've got my extent made and I got my target.
I got to put them together.
So my target extends I don't have any combinations right now so I'm going to pick my target which was
share and then pick my extent which is an extent and I'm going to hit OK
fantastic I think I've got everything set up right.
Notice there is no partitioning or formatting here that's going to be done by the individual users.
Once it connects to their systems.
So let's go ahead and now we're going to try to open up the ice because the initiator on my system here
and see if I can connect to it.
So pretty much all operating systems have some form of ice as the initiator.
And what I'm going to do first of all is I am going to look around and see if I can discover if there
anybody out there doing ice gets it.
Now I happen to know the IP address of my system and you notice it's running on port 30 60 and that
filled in.
I didn't get any errors.
That's telling me I did a good job.
So I'm going to go over to targets.
And here is a scuzzy target.
You'll see this is actually the nomenclature that's generated by ISKCON the colon and then whatever
I decided to call the share itself.
So I'm going to connect to it.
And if I've done everything right we should be able to see something really cool in Device Manager
sorry device manager disk management.
And there it is right there.
That is the extent on my scuzzy server that I've connected to.
So you'll see that it's an formatted unpartitioned So I would have to go through all these processes
of getting it formatted and partition and all that stuff.
And this guy is pretty much ready to rock and roll.
So for the exam the most important thing on what you remember is that network attached storage is going
to be file level that's going to be some system running Linux or something like that.
You go ahead you set up your RAID arrays you do your partitioning you do whatever you want to do format
it and then they just treat everybody as network shares.
It's going to be running Samba more than anything else.
Sand's are a different animal sans run at the block level they're either going to be using fiber channel
or they're going to be using ISKCON.
And it's up to the individual targets to set themselves up and to partition and format as they deem
themselves necessary.
Oh and remember one more thing sand's are really really expensive and masses tend to be very very cheap.