Jay wrote:
The subject line may be a bit stupid but I am looking to setup a system
where we have a requirment that we have a single view into a 32 TB storage
system (think of this as a one big C drive).

Right now we got 6 servers each with around 5 TB of storage, but to access
them we need to mount each server (Win 2003) and work on it which is
becoming cubersom.

Will iSCSI do the trick ? Product like SanMelody ?

Possibly, but it's not clear they'd to it well. If SanMelody can be
installed onto your existing servers while still leaving them available
to perform their current tasks, it can export some of their storage
using iSCSI - or you could use iSCSI more directly. But either of those
would do is give one of your servers access to the combined storage
resources (which it could then combine into a local file system - e.g.,
by creating a RAID volume): it would then have to turn around and
export that file system back to the other servers again (say, as a
'share') - so most access to data would require two hops over the
network in each direction: a read request would go first from the
client to the main file server, which would (unless it held the
requested data in its cache) then request the data from the server whose
disk actually held it, at which point the data would be returned to the
main file server, which would then send it to the original client (most
writes would take a similarly circuitous path).

So you'd really prefer an arrangement which allowed clients to interact
more directly with the server which held the target data. Some
'cluster' file systems like SANergy (from IBM/Tivoli, which IIRC is
available on Win2K and thus likely on Win2K3) and CXFS (from SGI and
Linux, but not AFAIK available on Win2K/Win2K3) support this, though
metadata operations are still handled centrally.

- bill