I apologize if this email is out of place, but I have the following personal project and I have been searching over the internet to try to find the best possible solution. We are not a big company and I am trying to implement some sort of SAN or NAS to consolidate my storage.

I have a whole bunch of PCs that are not longer in use and are just collecting dust, I'm trying to (in case it is possible) to somehow put them all to work as a single unit and use their hard drives or add more hard drives, to create a Storage Area Network. Is it possible, using Linux or BSD, to achieve this goal. Are there any recommendations as to where to start with this? I am eager to learn new things, I have experience using BSD and GNU/Linux, I just want to know which direction to go in order to achieve my goal.

Thanks and have a nice day

A SAN doesn't typically work like a bit bucket (eg: combining storage of 5-6 different machines into one storage item that can be presented to hosts). If you can get the drives all in one machine or something similar then you can present that storage to other machines as a NAS or SAN (whichever is appropriate).

If you're on a budget I'd say take a look at openfiler or freenas (I prefer the later.)

Sure.

1. Your first problem is hardware:

What drive types are these?
Are they compatible with each other?
Are they compatible with your HDD controller(s)?
How many HDD drives does your controller(s) permit together in a single PC?
Etc etc
<= These are all questions you need to answer for your particular hardware mix

2. Second, it sounds like (to whatever extent possible), you want to access multiple *physical* drives as a single *logical drive*.
So you need a Linux distro that supports "logical volume management".
Which, fortunately, is most of 'em

3. Finally, you want to decide how to "publish" your logical volumes across the network. NFS? Samba? "Something else"?

Independent of these considerations, you might also want to look at solutions like FreeNAS:

http://freenas.org/freenas

'Hope that helps .. PSM

@paulsm4

1. Hardware problems
Most of the PCs are Dell Dimension 2350, if hardware has to be exactly the same I can use those, which I have plenty.
They all have IDE drives.
I can have 2 drives per channel.

2. Yes, that's exactly what I am hoping for, grab all the small PCs, put them all to work as in a "cluster" and present the physical hard drives as logical volumes.
The GNU/Linux distribution is immaterial, I prefer Slackware, which is the ditro I have more experience with, but it could be debian, CentOS, whichever distro, BSD even, as long as I can, if possible, achieve my goal.

3. 99.9% of my clients and servers run on Windows, so I believe Samba will be the most acceptable way to publish the volumes, but it can be iSCSI, ZFS, etc. I started looking into Windows Storage Server 2008, but I didn't get very far, could not find good sources of documentation to achieve my goal.

If FreeNas can accomplish this, I will be more than happy to use it. Again, I am trying to use the most cost effective and highest performance possible, for this initial stage the resources are my plethora of PCs, the internet to download GNU/Linux or BSD and 0 dollars.

Thanks,

This is just a follow up,

I did manage to somehow accomplish my goal, I ended up using FreeNAS, put together 3 of the PC (I have more identical ones, just used three for research and testing).

I will explain my configuration in the hope that someone can point me some tips on how to increase the performance.

For convinience I will call the PCs PC0, PC1 and PC2. They are all P4 with 1 GB of RAM and 50 GB IDE HDD. PC1 and PC2 where configured as iSCSI target, while PC0 has the iSCSI initiator plus the CIFS service. I created a RAID 5 in PC0 using 2 10GB iSCSI volumes from PC1 and 2 10GB iSCSI volumes from PC2, then I mounted that Raid5 volume and I was able to access the share from my computer.

While I am quite sure it mightn ot be the best solution to this for the moment it worked, although, I'm still hoping that some of you might have some advice that could help me increase the performance of this. Just as a reference, it took about 9 hours to build a 30GB Raid5, although I don't know if this is expected.

Well I just wanted to share some of my experience of the last few days on how to put together a really cheap NAS/SAN.

Have a nice day.

Try openfiler.

Here is a full implementation link.

http://helpinlinux.blogspot.com/2010...openfiler.html