Christian Zartl, BSc

Private blog and WWW page

Christian Zartl, BSc

Christian Zartl, BSc - Private blog and WWW page

Tagesarchive: Reasons

Open-Source SAN – Part 1: Introduction

The last month has seen very less blogging. This is due to several reasons like major changes in my private free time (but I don't want to bore you with that) and busy weeks at work (our mail server had a total system fail). But mainly it is because I'm working on a new project which takes all of my time and attention at the moment.

I'm evaluating the best working solution for an open-source Storage Area Network (SAN) that provides a small private cloud (or at least a cluster). As it took me hours of research, days of testing and numerous issues I was running into, I thought I should share my collected experience with you.

Maybe this could help you with your own decision and save you from wasting so much time as it was in my case. First of all I want to make clear that I'm not really going to compare different solutions with each other, but more cite what is available out there and might fit you best.

The main “problem” is that all of the mentioned products are very good software and have their own advantages for special use cases. So at last you have to make your own decision about what you exactly need and then find the solution that fits you best.

As this is also what I did, let me mention what were my requirements:

  • Linux-based
  • ZFS or at least snapshot functionality
  • iSCSI
  • Cluster / replication functionality, high availability or reliability (DRBD)
  • Web Interface or some other kind of GUI
  • S.M.A.R.T or other kind of monitoring and automatic notification system

Now the solutions I found:

If you have something to add here, I would appreciate if you could let me know via a comment to this post. I will discuss my personal requirements within every single appliance in more detail in the following blog posts.

next: Part 2: FreeNAS last: Part 4: Solaris-based Appliances

Ten reasons you shouldn't go to film school

Recently I found this very interesting list of arguments why you should or should not go to film school. The article is quite old already, but I think it is now even more right than it was back then. I also believe that some of these points apply to completely different areas of life, too.

In IT you also have a lot of great people working who have learned everything on their own, without studying IT. Still there are a lot of advantages attending school, especially belonging the basics and "wide view" you can get taught there.

Also IT might not be a classical kind of "art", even if you often need loads of creativity to write good applications or find the right solution for a given problem.

I've never thought about going to film school, mainly as film making in a small country like Austria is not very promising. But to be honest I think Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo really hit the point by writing "you either have it or not".

So maybe one has to accept he just doesn't have it. That doesn't automatically mean you have to stop trying or even dreaming. But sometimes it might be better to just have dreams, than trying to live them, fail and then having to give them up.