Can non-similar operating systems share a disk?

Is it possible that in a SAN environment different operating systems can share the same disk? If so, is there a hub or switch required or can this be done with both?

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The question is: Is it possible for non-similar operating systems to share a disk. The answer is yes - it is possible. However, is it easy and can I tell you what does it today? No, I can't. There have been a few attempts that have not been commercial successes. I keep expecting to see more products that do this - but it's not trivial and the market hasn't indicated to development companies that the effort would pay off.

This is an area that is interesting to me personally and I'd like to hear from people about what their requirements would be for this.

FWIW, data sharing is something that NAS excels at - but it's not disk sharing. NAS doesn't share a disk - it shares files on servers.

Regards,
Marc

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This was first published in April 2002

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