 kamm
join:2001-02-14
Brooklyn, NY
2 edits | reply to fifty nine
Re: HBA card? said by fifty nine:said by kamm:said by fifty nine:So essentially what they've done is made an iSCSI HBA card for general network use. Well, you would likely use CAT5 cabling in both cases, that's the only thing that pops into my mind right now as similarity.  Let me guess: you have yet to see iSCSI in life, right?  FYI: this has nothing to do with iSCSI. With iSCSI you can utilize SCSI command set via TCP/IP eg get block-level access via Eth etc - this network card has nothing to do neither with block-level storage access nor SCSI command set.  Not really. I've actually set up pretty large iSCSI and Fiber channel arrays and SANs, one of them with hundreds of hosts and replication between two datacenters. I didn't mean it was exactly like an HBA but the concept was similar - offload I/O processing to the NIC so that the main CPU isn't tied up. Most people I know use regular GigE NICs however. The one iSCSI array we have (Dell Equalogic) is connected to the hosts with GigE NICs. Well, offloading is nothing specific to iSCSI either if you think about it - in fact it was available for eth cards well before iSCSI IIRC.
As a side note I hate iSCSI - it was a nice idea originally to bring down the price of FC deployment cost but Microsoft pretty much SABOTAGED it by buying up WinTarget then subsequently killing off iSCSI target support from ANYTHING expect Unified Data Storage Server 2003 - for which aone they should've been sued out of existence, let alone suing them for lying about WSS R2 shipping with target...
iSCSI nowadays is a complete PoS solution for any Windows-based storage: free target sw are all junk, anything useful (ie StarWind) starts around $800 and up - ahh and Xen doesn't even work with it... 
I don't know the story on unix - is it any better?
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said by bicker:Waaaa waaaa waaaa. You just want what you want and don't care to factor in what is right or true. Your perspectives are un-American, and deserve far more ridicule than I'm prepared to pile on them. |
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| We use it on RedHat and VMWare ESXi. Still junk and not supported by a lot of things. Some hosts had trouble recognizing the array and it took a lot of fenangling to get it to work.
We've migrated nearly everything that was on iSCSI to 4GBps fiber channel now. More expensive but also more mature and robust. |
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kamm
join:2001-02-14
Brooklyn, NY | said by fifty nine:We use it on RedHat and VMWare ESXi. Still junk and not supported by a lot of things. Some hosts had trouble recognizing the array and it took a lot of fenangling to get it to work. We've migrated nearly everything that was on iSCSI to 4GBps fiber channel now. More expensive but also more mature and robust. Yeah, I know - my entire centralized storage backend runs on FC4 using shared file system.
The only problem was that I had to build out another, more expensive (FC) network - cost is one thing but managing another infrastructure is a bigger issue.
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[BQUOTE=[user=bicker]]Waaaa waaaa waaaa. You just want what you want and don't care to factor in what is right or true. Your perspectives are un-American, and deserve far more ridicule than I'm prepared to pile on them.
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 jester121Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL | reply to kamm
What the heck is that rant all about? We have a small iSCSI SAN that runs ESXi and a Windows Server 2003 file server flawlessly. |
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kamm
join:2001-02-14
Brooklyn, NY | said by jester121:What the heck is that rant all about? We have a small iSCSI SAN that runs ESXi and a Windows Server 2003 file server flawlessly. And?
I guess you want to read my 'rant' again...
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[BQUOTE=[user=bicker]]Waaaa waaaa waaaa. You just want what you want and don't care to factor in what is right or true. Your perspectives are un-American, and deserve far more ridicule than I'm prepared to pile on them.
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