iSCSI is a network storage protocol that allows sending and receiving of SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. This allows you to leverage Ethernet, a low cost network medium to get SAN performance and network based storage. While you can use pretty much any Ethernet switch, I’d recommend that if you’re going to use iSCSI that you dedicate a switch to it, or use quality switches and build a dedicated VLAN for your iSCSI traffic. Recently, I’ve recently been seeing a lot of traffic about whether or not you can use iSCSI with Mac OS X. The answer, yes. As with Xsan, to get started with iSCSI you’ll need an…
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iSCSI Target Creation
The iSCSI Initiator that we use for connecting Windows to iSCSI targets has a friend. It’s called Microsoft Windows Storage Server, which you can use to turn a DAS RAID in a Windows box into a LUN for iSCSI. Good stuff. Check out the data sheet here: download.microsoft.com/download/d/8/4/ d84b1c50-e0bb-45ba-b2f4-356f4f456a88/WUDSS%20Datasheet_Final.doc Now that’s not to say they’re the only game in town. iSCSI Target is also a feature of OpenSolaris: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/iscsitgt/ And there’s a nifty little Open Source Project called iSCSI Enterprise Target: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iscsitarget/?abmode=1