Can the data on a SAN device be accessed by multiple file systems?

Can a single file system be mounted on multiple systems in a SAN enviornment?

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I'm not sure that I understood your question properly. If you meant "can the data on a SAN device be accessible by multiple file systems" the answer is clearly yes.

In principle, data stored in a SAN is accesible to every system that has access to the SAN and knows the address of the device. By the way, this is one of the issues SANs tend to have with Windows NT systems, as NT does not recognize when another file system already manages a certain resource and just writes its allocation information on the storage resource assuming it has exclusive access and ownership to all storage it can see.

To prevent multiple access to SAN storage, methods like zoning and LUN masking are used.

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This was first published in October 2003

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