Connecting a Direct Attached Storage array to multiple servers

Question

Is it possible to connect multiple servers to the same Direct Attached Storage array, something like the Dell MD1200 or MD1220? I see from the specs that each one of these arrays supports two controller cards, each with two SAS ports.

So does this mean that I can connect four servers to the same array? Can I then create virtual disks and each one of them to a specific server? Would all the virtual disks then be visible and accessible from each server?

I hope i'm making sense but please let me know if I need to give more details.

Solution

Looks like you can operate it in "split mode" - http://i.dell.com/sites/content/business/solutions/engineering-docs/en/Documents/storage-powervault-md12x0-technical-guidebook.pdf That means half the drives connected to one host, half to the other.

This is NOT a clustered (shared LUN) storage array. You would need to bump up to a MD3200 for that. Alternately, you could connect the array to a single server and use something like OpenFiler to present iSCSI targets, NFS, or CIFS.

Comments

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Also, Windows Server 2012 supports creating iSCSI targets directly, as part of the OS.