11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
4:29 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
These people think it's efficient to run a copy of
Windows 2003 on a
server (which needs a couple of gig of RAM to work well) and then run
multiple VMs on that containing copies of Windows 2003 or other
flavours of Windows. They think virtualisation is new and clever and
it doesn't occur to them that not only is this wasteful of resources,
but it's a nightmare to keep all those copies patched and current.
They think that encapsulating SCSI over TCP/IP is an
efficient way to
connect servers to disk farms.
I'm generally on board with what Liam said, in spirit at least. But I do
look at these two issues differently: They are both "outboard" fixes to
long-standing problems with NT and they make life easier in the trenches.
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.
Virtualization may waste resources, but CPU and RAM are the cheapeast
part of the stack now.
What you get is easy recovery of whole system images,
plus the ability run a bunch of legacy setups that ran on
dedicated machines 5 years ago on one new box.
That actually saves resources.
I guess what I am saying is, I'll take some slightly hacky ways to improve
life with an OS that I can't easily avoid, over the alternative
of just having to use said suboptimal OS with no extra help.
11 Jun
11 Jun
4:51 p.m.
On Jun 11, 2009, at 12:29 PM, John Finigan wrote:
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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.
-Dave
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.
6:05 p.m.
On Jun 11, 2009, at 1:05 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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'm looking forward to that too. I have a "grownup" SAN here, but
I've been playing with iSCSI just to see what its capabilities and
performance are like. So far I've been impressed with the
implementations I've seen...except for the GlobalSAN initiator for OS
X, which is buggy to the point of being useless, and the company
doesn't seem to care.
I just hope that it works with more than just HP
storage solutions.
If it doesn't, then it's a sucky and buggy iSCSI implementation.
I'd be surprised if they did that.
-Dave
10:22 p.m.
New subject: iSCSI and friends, was Re: UNIX V7
On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 12:51 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Jun 11, 2009, at 12:29 PM, John Finigan wrote:
> iSCSI makes up (in a clumsy way) for a lack of a "first class citizen"
Eh. (and this is WAY OT) iSCSI is kinda
interesting; I've been
working with it quite a bit lately.
Have you seen ATAoE? It is, as the name implies, ATA over Ethernet.
Unlike the 300-page mail-order catalogue of the iSCSI spec, the ATAoE
spec is eight pages, mostly taken up with diagrams showing an ATA packet
wrapped inside an Ethernet frame.
I toyed briefly with the idea of writing an ATAoE target for the PDP11.
Not sure if I could port it to OS/2, though, or make it talk to TK50s.
Gordon.
12 Jun
12 Jun
2:33 a.m.
New subject: AOE was:Re: iSCSI and friends, was Re: UNIX V7
At 11:22 PM 6/11/2009 +0100, you wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 12:51 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
Gord:
We here at Milwaukee County Transit have about 59TB on AOE
(ATA-over-Ethernet). We use these 15-slot boxes from Coraid that boot up a
little Linux kernel- but that's largely invisible to the user. It uses all
the existing wiring- cat 5, fiber, whatever. We dedicated some small
ethernet switches to them, but you wouldn't necessarily have to. One of
them is across the street, on a fiber link, in case the building blows up.
The Coraid boxes use standard SATA drives, any size, and support all kinda
array structures, RAID levels, etc. I think the AOE "initiator" is
open-source, so you should be able to port it to older architecture.
-----
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hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called
software. -- Anonymous
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On Jun 11, 2009, at 12:29 PM, John Finigan
wrote:
> iSCSI makes up (in a clumsy way) for a lack of a "first class citizen"
Eh. (and this is WAY OT) iSCSI is kinda
interesting; I've been
working with it quite a bit lately.
Have you seen ATAoE? It is, as the name implies, ATA over Ethernet.
Unlike the 300-page mail-order catalogue of the iSCSI spec, the ATAoE
spec is eight pages, mostly taken up with diagrams showing an ATA packet
wrapped inside an Ethernet frame.
I toyed briefly with the idea of writing an ATAoE target for the PDP11.
Not sure if I could port it to OS/2, though, or make it talk to TK50s. 
2:54 a.m.
New subject: AOE was:Re: iSCSI and friends, was Re: UNIX V7
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Tom Peters<tpeters at mixcom.com> wrote:
At 11:22 PM 6/11/2009 +0100, you wrote:
We have one of those too, at Sandia National Labs.
Guess what the underlying system is? It's actually Plan 9, not Linux.
We have a 16-slot Coraid box full of 1 TB drives. It works very nicely
with our Plan 9 box... we use it for our archival storage system,
Venti.
John
--
"I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS
reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C,
Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba
On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 12:51 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
Gord:
We here at Milwaukee County Transit have about 59TB on AOE
(ATA-over-Ethernet). We use these 15-slot boxes from Coraid that boot up a
little Linux kernel- but that's largely invisible to the user. It uses all
the existing wiring- cat 5, fiber, whatever. We dedicated some small
ethernet switches to them, but you wouldn't necessarily have to. One of them
is across the street, on a fiber link, in case the building blows up. The
Coraid boxes use standard SATA drives, any size, and support all kinda array
structures, RAID levels, etc. I think the AOE "initiator" is open-source, so
you should be able to port it to older architecture.
On Jun 11, 2009, at 12:29 PM, John Finigan
wrote:
> iSCSI makes up (in a clumsy way) for a lack of a "first class citizen"
? ?Eh. ?(and this is WAY OT) ?iSCSI is kinda
interesting; I've been
working with it quite a bit lately.
Have you seen ATAoE? ?It is, as the name implies, ATA over Ethernet.
Unlike the 300-page mail-order catalogue of the iSCSI spec, the ATAoE
spec is eight pages, mostly taken up with diagrams showing an ATA packet
wrapped inside an Ethernet frame.
I toyed briefly with the idea of writing an ATAoE target for the PDP11.
Not sure if I could port it to OS/2, though, or make it talk to TK50s.
8:21 a.m.
New subject: iSCSI and friends, was Re: UNIX V7
On Jun 11, 2009, at 6:22 PM, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
That's just frightening. ATA is ugly enough when it *isn't* being
tunneled.
> iSCSI
makes up (in a clumsy way) for a lack of a "first class
> citizen"
Eh. (and this is WAY OT) iSCSI is kinda
interesting; I've been
working with it quite a bit lately.
Have you seen ATAoE? It is, as the name implies, ATA over Ethernet.
Unlike the 300-page mail-order catalogue of the iSCSI spec, the ATAoE
spec is eight pages, mostly taken up with diagrams showing an ATA
packet
wrapped inside an Ethernet frame. I toyed briefly with the idea of writing an ATAoE
target for the
PDP11.
Not sure if I could port it to OS/2, though, or make it talk to TK50s.
Now ok, I have to admit I think that'd be kinda fun.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
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mcguire＠neurotica.com -
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tpeters＠mixcom.com