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