11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
5:05 p.m.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Jun 11, 2009, at 12:29 PM, John Finigan wrote:
Currently iSCSI is only supported on VMS running on Itanium (I think it's in
8.3-1). The one feature I'm really looking forwards to in OpenVMS v8.4 is
the iSCSI support, as it is supposed to be in there for Alpha as well (
hopefully they haven't dropped that feature). I just hope that it works
with more than just HP storage solutions. I want to use iSCSI to connect my
home VMS server to disks on my FreeNAS box. I'm mainly thinking of it as a
backup solution, but if it works well enough, I'll likely look into moving
most of my data disks over to iSCSI.
Where I work iSCSI is most definitely *NOT* the answer, but there are plenty
of situations where it is a good answer. I definitely find it to be
interesting.
Zane
iSCSI makes up (in a clumsy way) for a lack of a
"first class citizen"
network file protocol in NT. Since you can't run SQL Server over something
like NFS, it is about the only way to get it on a networked storage device.
And if you want some of the nice "storage virtualization" features like
volume snaps and clones, you pretty much want network storage.
Eh. (and this is WAY OT) iSCSI is kinda interesting; I've been working
with it quite a bit lately. It is a poor-man's replacement for FibreChannel,
nothing more. The only other possible advantage is that it can be routed
over a WAN, and anyone who tries to do that with low-level-access storage
needs their head examined anyway.
So...It's neat, it works, it's almost universally supported (even VMS has an
iSCSI stack) it's reasonably interoperable, and when it grows up, it wants to
be FibreChannel.