BITS Pilani

presentation
BITS Pilani Sourish Banerjee
WILP
Pilani Campus
 BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

Data Storage Technology and Networks (Merged -

CSIZC446/ESZC446/ISZC446/SSZC446)

CS 05
Books

T1 Storage Networking-Real World Skills for the CompTIA Storage+ Certification

and Beyond by Nigel Poulton, Publishers, SYBEX a Wiley brand, 2015

T2 Storage Networks Explained – by Ulf Troppens, Wolfgang Muller-Freidt,

Rainer Wolafka, IBM Storage Software Development, Germany. Publishers:
Wiley

R1 Storage Networks: The complete Reference, Robert Spalding TMH.

R2 Web resource : http://www.snia.org

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DAS again (briefly)

• Uses block level

protocol for data access
• Ideal for local data
provisioning
• Quick deployment for
small environments
• Simple to deploy • Low capital expense
• Low complexity

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DAS Connectivity Options
• Fibre Channel is primarily used to
connect computer data storage to
• ATA (IDE) and SATA
servers in storage area networks
• Primarily for internal bus (SAN) in commercial data centers.

• SCSI • ESCON (Enterprise Systems

Connection) is a data connection
• Parallel (primarily for internal created by IBM, and is commonly
used to connect their mainframe
bus) computers to peripheral devices such
• Serial (external bus) as disk storage and tape drives.
ESCON is an optical fiber, half-
• FC duplex, serial interface.
• High speed network technology • FICON (Fibre Connection) is the IBM
proprietary name for the ANSI FC-
• Buss and Tag SB-3 Single-Byte Command Code
• Primarily for external mainframe Sets-3 Mapping Protocol for Fibre
Channel (FC) protocol.
• Precursor to ESCON and FICON
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DAS Management
• Internal
• Host provides:
• Disk partitioning (Volume management)
• File system layout
• Direct Attached Storage managed individually through the
server and the OS
• External
• Array based management
• Lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for managing data
and storage Infrastructure
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DAS Challenges
• Scalability is limited
• Number of connectivity ports to hosts
• Difficulty to add more capacity
• Limited bandwidth
• Distance limitations
• Downtime required for maintenance with internal DAS
• Limited ability to share resources
• Array front-end port
• Unused resources cannot be easily re-allocated
• Resulting in islands of over / under utilized storage pools
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NAS

• NAS is shared storage on a network infrastructure

• File Sharing
• Storing and accessing data files over network
• File system must be mounted in order to access files
• Traditional client/server model, implemented with file-
sharing protocols for remote file sharing
• Example: FTP, CIFS (also known as SMB), NFS, DFS
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Benefits of using NAS

• Support comprehensive access to information

• Improves efficiency – uses special purpose OS
• Improved flexibility – platform independent
• Centralizes storage
• Simplifies management
• Scalability
• High availability – provide redundant components
• Provides security integration to environment (user
authentication and authorization)

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File Sharing Protocols (For NAS)

• Two common NAS file sharing protocols are:

• NFS – Network File System protocol
• Traditional UNIX environment file sharing protocol
• CIFS – Common Internet File System protocol
• Traditional Microsoft environment file sharing
protocol, based upon the Server Message Block
protocol

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NFS

• Client/server application
• Uses RPC mechanisms over TCP protocol
• Mount points grant access to remote hierarchical file
structures for local file system structures
• Access to the mount can be controlled by permissions

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CIFS

• Developed by Microsoft in 1996

• An enhanced version of the Server Message Block (SMB)
protocol
• Stateful Protocol
• Can automatically restore connections and reopen files
that were open prior to interruption
• Operates at the Application/Presentation layer of the OSI
model
• Most commonly used with Microsoft operating systems, but
is platform-independent
• CIFS runs over TCP/IP and uses DNS (Domain Naming
Service) for name resolution BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
Start here

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Digging deeper (NFS)

• Any computer file system that supports sharing of files and

other resources as persistent storage over a computer
network
• Sun Network File System (NFS) has become de facto
standard for distributed UNIX file access.
• NFS runs over LAN, even WAN (slowly)
• Interconnected workstations viewed as a set of independent
machines with independent file systems, which allows
sharing among these file systems in a transparent manner
• A remote directory is mounted over a local file system
directory

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Digging deeper (NFS)
• A remote directory is mounted over a local file system
directory
• The mounted directory looks like an integral subtree of the
local file system, replacing the subtree descending from the
local directory
• Specification of the remote directory for the mount operation
is nontransparent; the host name of the remote directory
has to be provided
• Files in the remote directory can then be accessed in a
transparent manner
• Subject to access-rights accreditation, potentially any file
system (or directory within a file system), can be mounted
remotely on top of any local directory BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
Digging deeper (NFS)

• NFS is designed to operate in a heterogeneous environment

of different machines, operating systems, and network
architectures; the NFS specifications independent of these
media
• This independence is achieved through the use of RPC
primitives built on top of an External Data Representation
(XDR) protocol used between two implementation-
independent interfaces
• The NFS specification distinguishes between the services
provided by a mount mechanism and the actual remote-file-
access services

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 XDR
• The XDR approach to standardizing data representations is canonical.
• That is, XDR defines a single byte order, a single floating-point representation
(IEEE), and so on.
• Any program running on any machine can use XDR to create portable data by
translating its local representation to the XDR standard representations.
• Similarly, any program running on any machine can read portable data by
translating the XDR standard representations to its local equivalents.
• The single standard completely decouples programs that create or send portable
data from those that use or receive portable data.
• A new machine learns how to convert the standard representations and its local
representations.
• The time spent converting to and from a canonical representation is insignificant,
especially in distributed applications.
• Most of the time required to prepare a data structure for transfer is not spent in
conversion but in traversing the elements of the data structure.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18752_01/html/816-1435/xdrnts-5.html BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
XDR (Study this if possible)

• Try the rpcgen

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/816-1435/rpcgenpguide-21470/index.html

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 Three Major Layers of NFS Architecture
• UNIX file-system interface (based on the open, read, write,
and close calls, and file descriptors)

• Virtual File System (VFS) layer – distinguishes local files

from remote ones, and local files are further distinguished
according to their file-system types
• The VFS activates file-system-specific operations to handle
local requests according to their file-system types
• Calls the NFS protocol procedures for remote requests
• NFS service layer – bottom layer of the architecture
• Implements the NFS protocol

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Schematic View of NFS Architecture

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 Setting up NFS Server/Client
sudo yum -y install nfs-utils (Both server &
client)

SERVER CLIENT
systemctl enable nfs-server.service mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/home
systemctl start nfs-server.service mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

mkdir /var/nfs mount <IP>0:/var/nfs /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

chown nfsnobody:nfsnobody /var/nfs
chmod 755 /var/nfs

edit "/etc/exports"
/var/nfs <IP>(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
exportfs -a

https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/setting-up-an-nfs-server-and-client-on-centos-7/ BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

 Common Internet File System
• The Common Internet File System (CIFS), also referred as Server Message Block
(SMB), is a network protocol whose most common use is sharing files on a (LAN).

• Allows a client to manipulate files just as if they were on the local computer.
Operations such as read, write, create, delete, and rename are all supported

• the only difference being that the files are not on the local computer and are
actually on a remote server.

• Works by sending packets from the client to the server.

• Each packet is typically a basic request of some kind, such as open file, close file,
or read file.

• Server receives the packet, checks to see if the request is legal, verifies the client
has the appropriate file permissions, and finally executes the request and returns
a response packet to the client.

• The client then parses the response packet and can determine whether or not the
initial request was successful.
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Common Internet File System
• In the OSI model, CIFS is a fairly
high-level network protocol,
probably best described at the
Application/Presentation layer.

• This means CIFS relies on other protocols for transport. The most common
protocol used for reliable transport is NetBIOS over TCP (NBT).

• Other protocols have been used for the transport layer, however with the
enormous popularity of the Internet, NBT has become the de-facto standard.

• Although file sharing is CIFS’s primary purpose, there are other functions that
CIFS is commonly associated with.

• BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Common Internet File System
• The CIFS protocol is most commonly used with Microsoft operating systems.

• Windows For Workgroups was the first Microsoft operating system to use CIFS,
and each Microsoft operating system since then has been able to function as both
a CIFS server and client.

• Microsoft operating systems use CIFS for remote file operations (typically
mapping network drives), browsing (via the Network Neighborhood icon),
authentication (NT and Windows 2000), and remote printer services.

• It would be fair to say the core of native Microsoft networking is built around its
CIFS services.

• Flavours of the Unix operating system also implement a CIFS client/server

via the Samba program.

• Apple computers also have CIFS clients and servers available, which might make
CIFS the most common protocol for file sharing available.

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Common Internet File System
• There are at least 100 different CIFS operations to date, and the list keeps
on growing. The modestly robust feature set includes:
• File access • Protocol negotiation
• File and record locking • Extended file attribute handling
• Safe file caching • Batched requests
• File change notification • Unicode support

• The CIFS protocol, however, is definitely showing signs of age. The

protocol’s feature set has been extended several times and there are
multiple CIFS packets that accomplish the same task, with many of the
CIFS packets have undocumented options.
• The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Storage Networking
Industry Association (SNIA) are trying hard to remedy this dilemma. They
are both working towards creating the CIFS1.0 specification, which lists only
a subset of the current CIFS operations that need to be supported into the
future.

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 Samba
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/SambaIntro.html
yum install samba samba-client samba-common
• Check Windows Machine Workgroup **# chcon -t samba_share_t
Settings /srv/samba/anonymous
– Right clicking on “This PC” or “My vim /etc/samba/smb.conf
[global]
Computer” → Properties → Advanced
workgroup = WORKGROUP
system settings → Computer Name. netbios name = centos
security = user
[Anonymous]
• Configuring Samba4 on CentOS 7 comment = Anonymous File Server Share
path = /srv/samba/anonymous
• cp /etc/samba/smb.conf browsable =yes
/etc/samba/smb.conf.orig writable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
force user = nobody
• Samba4 Anonymous File Sharing
• # mkdir -p /srv/samba/anonymous # testparm
• # chmod -R 0775 # systemctl enable smb.service
/srv/samba/anonymous # systemctl enable nmb.service
• # chown -R nobody:nobody # systemctl start smb.service
/srv/samba/anonymous
# systemctl start nmb.service
https://www.tecmint.com/install-samba4-on-centos-7-for-file-sharing-on-windows/
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 Samba
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/SambaIntro.html

Setup Samba4 Secure File Sharing # vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

# groupadd smbgrp [Secure]
# usermod admin -aG smbgrp comment = Secure File Server
Share
# smbpasswd -a admin
path = /srv/samba/secure
# mkdir -p /srv/samba/secure valid users = @smbgrp
# chmod -R 0770 /srv/samba/secure guest ok = no
# chown -R root:smbgrp /srv/samba/secure writable = yes
browsable = yes
# testparm
# systemctl restart smb.service
# systemctl restart nmb.service

** # chcon -t samba_share_t
/srv/samba/secure

https://www.tecmint.com/install-samba4-on-centos-7-for-file-sharing-on-windows/
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus