Re: VMS SAN Primer

Paul Lentz wrote:

I sorta knew there couldn't be much difference...

But wait a minute, don't SANs use very different terminology. They talk
about switches, fabric etc .

And don't SANs have many many capabilities such as RAID, abilities to
comvine physical disks into a single drive, or partition a single drive
into multiple drives ?

Do SANs provide any concept of shared locking ? Can a node request that
a block on a drive be locked for writes by other nodes ?

Or is it pretty much a total free for all with SANs just blindly
executing requests on any drive from any node ?

(I would assume that SANs would have ability to provide "views" which
means that a particular node woudl have a defined list of disks it can
access ? Or can it go and peak at disk drives that have been assigned to
other nodes ?


Seems to me that there would be a large number of management issues to
deal with that would not be needed in case of a VMS cluster. A VMS
cluster offers a single security concept, shared locking etc. When you
have different seperate nodes accesing drives in a SAN, those are no
longer applicable.
.