I having a 7-bay NAS box with Raid-5 (5.3TB usable) with netgear gigabit Ethernet switch to connect the hosts (3 windows7 machine Specs: i7 / 16GB RAM / 1TB HDD / gigabit Ethernet NIC). (All of the endpoints are configured with jumbo frame support 9014B).
As well NAS BOX have 2 Separate 1G Ethernet port(Supports LINK AGGREGATION/LOAD BALANCE/FAIL-OVER,etc..) as well one pci slot where i can use 10G Ethernet card if required.
And configured the single SCSI volume over my nas box with available max space to be used.
And now my requirement is, i want the concurrent access to single scsi volume with highest possible throughput from each of machine(Editing Machine ADOBE CS5).
How it would be possible ?
Using any third party alliances like metaSAN iSCSI, DataPlow ?
Or Dedicated open source storage system like FreeNas or a open filler ?
Or any other solution to work with it..
In advanced thanks to all who suggest/help me.
Best Answer
Concurrent access to a block device like iSCSI is not possible with standard file systems. You'll need a shared disk filesystem (like GFS or OCSFS) to allow this, but in most cases the easiest solution would be to just use a network share (via SMB/CIFS or NFS) if this is sufficient for your application.
Edit: This is getting too long for a comment.
You'll end up with a multitude of problems and I guess you won't be able to get this to work with what you got.
Your first problem will be the RAID itself. I don't see that you get a sustained write rate of >250 MB/s with three separate data streams on a simple 7 disk NAS RAID5. This might work for one data stream, but not for multiple concurrent streams.
The network. I don't know how many interfaces the NAS box has, but you'll get around 100MB/s of data through a single 1GB/s connection in the best of cases so unless you have at least three interfaces, the network will already limit you. And even if you have that many interfaces, the NAS has to allow to map them all to the same iSCSI target or allow to trunk them into one (which in turn require support at least from the switch).
If this is all somehow working, you can pick some shared disk filesystem that supports Windows and try to implement a cluster filesystem with this, but this FS will have some overhead of it's own, further limiting you.
Honestly, you should have got a consultant design a solution for your requirement before buying stuff, this is far beyond the simple office file sharing most NAS devices are designed and optimized to do.