iSCSI for Mac OS X?

CoffeePlease asks: "Is anyone aware of development going on for iSCSI drivers for Mac OS X? I really need this but it's only out for Windows and Linux so far. I can't use the Linux drivers - they might run, but only as a command-line process, and I need other software to recognize the drives."

Re:oh, whatever

[aderusha]

1) firewire - no managment, just loose drives attached to single machines. might as well suggest a usb memory stick. firewire drives don't make a san.

2) fibre channel - cost of entry approaching $50k. that adds up to about 50k reasons not to use it on a home machine or small network.

3) network storage - not really a block level disk access technology, is it?

i think the real reason is that very few people are using macs in a data center serving up real applications to lots of clients - the sorta place where a well managed SAN makes sense. now that the draft standard has been finalized (but not ratified), i imagine that you'll see iSCSI becoming more commoditized and more software being made available for more OSs.

note that the windows and linux software packages are only iSCSI initiators - i haven't seen any software based iSCSI targets. this means that even if you did port the code to Darwin you'd still have to have some storage device out there speaking iSCSI to point your mac at.

Re:oh, whatever

[gerardrj]

Eccept that in my experience most Datacenters are migrating to net attached storage. People are tired of SANs, the high chost of parts and maintenence, the difficultly and expense of backing up, etc.
Sure... it SOUNDS great to have 5TB of storage in one unit, but just exactly how do you keep current off-site backups? Oh... that's right... you maintain another 5TB unit in another location and run a dedicated T3 between them, yea... THAT'S affordable.

The SAN was a great idea, Fiber Channel was a great idea, but it never reached critical mss, and now distributed network storage is taking over. iSCSI will propbaly make some inroads, but it will never replace a simple device with network ports actining as a server. The latter is cheap, esily understood, easily maintained, provides 95% of the functionality necessary to any IT department, and the clients are built in to every major OS on the market.

Re:oh, whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of apps, though that demand disk-level access to things. Sure, you could push a lot of things to DFS (in the windows world)--even, conceivably a nice system like an XRAID. But for systems that demand a disk level access, such as SQL, Exchange, etc., a SAN or Server attached storage is the only way to go now.

iSCSI would change that, and bring the power of SAN-type storage to a much better budget point. It's true, SANs are too limiting and too finicky and way way too expensive. That's by the XRAID looks appealing and would be more appealing if an attached XServe could serve up the disk space as an iSCSI drive.

I'm less interested in seeing the proliferation of iSCSI clients, and much more interested in the proliferation of iSCSI target software. It'll make storage that much more flexible.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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