[CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

Wed Oct 21 07:25:27 UTC 2009
Rudi Ahlers <rudiahlers at gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:12 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
> Rudi Ahlers wrote
>> Simple, it's only a NAS device, and not really a file server / web
>> server / data base server as well. The purposes I needed is to replace
>> SMB on the network, and iSCSI seemed like a good alternative. The
>> server in question is a dev server, which I thought would be
>> beneficial to setup as an iSCSI server as well and connect other
>> servers to it's storage, and thus consolidate the storage on it :)
>>
>
>
>
> whoa.  ISCSI is *NOT* a NAS/SMB replacement.
>
>
> ISCSI is a SAN replacement, a low budget (and lower performance)
> alternative to Fibrechannel..   a given iSCSI target volume can only be
> accessed by a single initiator (client) at a time, unless you're running
> some sort of cluster file system that supports shared block devices.
>
>
> _______________________________________________


John, you're right. iSCSI isn't an SMB replacement as I have learned
through all of this. SMB is good for sharing data between many PC's,
and even servers, but from what I understand it's also slower that
iSCSI and won't allow me to scale the storage by simply adding another
cheap server to the network. With iSCSI I could / should be able todo
that.

OR am I approaching this from a different angle? If I wanted to setup
a server to serve content (in this case file storage, www, email &
SQL) to a network of computers, would iSCSI have served the purpose?
Or should I have kept using SMB? I am looking for a way to quickly
expand the whole setup though. If we need more space, then I just want
to add another cheap server with a 1TB HDD, and have it available on
the network. It is my impression that I could use iSCSI, probably
together with XFS, to accomplish this?


-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
CEO, SoftDux Hosting
Web: http://www.SoftDux.com
Office: 087 805 9573
Cell: 082 554 7532