Chapter 4. Storage

Storage can be an extensive topic, but the storage paradigm for the Mac platform is unique—there are far fewer options than with other environments, which helps to constrain the conversation. It's not that you can't use most enterprise-class storage systems, it's just that you won't find the proliferation of storage types, file systems, and storage-access protocols that you will with, say, Windows. Still, OS X supports iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FC, which we'll discuss when we get to Xsan SAN systems) as well as numerous network access protocols—client and server—that run over Ethernet: Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Network File System (NFS), and Server Message Block/Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS).

For the purpose of this chapter, we're going to divide storage into two types. The first, client storage, we'll define as data repositories accessed via the AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS, or Dfs (Microsoft's Distributed file system) network protocols. Though you may be using others, these are the major players. We'll assume your organization already has a solution in place to supply one of the four, and the Mac will simply be fitting into an existing paradigm. The second type of storage we'll cover is SAN (Storage Area Network) systems—specifically, drive networks accessed through FC or iSCSI protocols. The benefits of a SAN lie primarily in the centralization of data and storage resources, true block-level access to storage, and much better performance.

In addition to client storage and SANs, this chapter looks at ExtremeZ-IP, a software package that allows Windows Server to share existing data to Mac clients using their native protocol, AFP.