SAN - NFS and CIFS
I am an application developer and very new to storage and SAN technologies, So this is a very basic question. Recently I had a requirement to have common storage share mounted on both Linux and windows. I asked a few storage people in my company about how this can be done, got some mixed responses. I know that there using Samba NFS share can be accessed on windows. Here are my questions.
We use Netapp storage array, Can SAN create NFS or CIFS shares, I thought SAN provides raw storage ( like a physical hard drive), and operating system would install filesystem on it.
How can I set up a common share and control permission for windows users
Solution 1:
1) SANs are all about blocks so these are iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and FCoE. But you can hardly find "true" or "pure" SANs these days maybe only Nimble and Equallogic who can't do also NAS protocols like NFS and SMB in addition to block ones. These are called "multiprotocol" storage appliances.
http://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-3490.pdf (Multiprotocol NetApp guide)
2) You'd better go SMB here. NetApp can talk some lower dialect of SMB3 (no SMB Multichannel and no SMB Direct yet) and it's preferred way to feed files to Windows because NFS on Windows just sucks. Linux/*BSD guys will use Samba client.
https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1196891/html/GUID-3E1361E4-4170-4992-85B2-FEA71C06645F.html (SMB3 dialect NetApp "talks")
https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1366834/html/GUID-07F8E056-12EF-4591-8BEA-7C28F7B54854.html (SMB share permissions on NetApp howto)
Solution 2:
it's a good idea to use Windows-based file service for Windows users. BaronSamedi1958 mentioned the dialects - this is what you need to avoid as it will BTW, the free MS Hyper-V server can act as an SMB 3.0 share https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/smb3-0-fileserver-on-free-microsoft-hyper-v-server-2012r2-clustered/ (Keep in mind you'll need a full version to do it without license misuse)