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Re: I've tested Xsan connected to Openfiler iSCSI target...

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Mark <email@hidden> wrote:
Hi all,

we are a pretty small company working mostly with compressed HD video, so we do not really have the need for the high bandwidth of fibre channel (nor have we the budged for it) - our AFP/SMB is fast enough.

Still, Xsan has a few things that make it quite interesting for us:
- spotlight support
- ACL support
- Time Machine support
- a working "network" trash (files are imediatelly deleted over AFP/SMB, a pain)
- easy expansion of storage (storage pools)
- storage affinity

WIth this in mind, I started to build a poor mans test SAN:
- Openfiler 2.3 beta 2 as iSCSI storage server (open source)
- Studio Network Solutions globalSAN iSCSI client for OSX (freeware)
- one MacPro acting as Xsan client/controller connected to the iSCSI LUNs

Does Xsan admin see the iSCSI LUNS?  Did you have to do anything special to get this working?

Yes - they appear in Xsan admin without any extra config. The only problem seems to be controller restarts, where the Xsan FS is not mounted/started. I guess this is caused by the iSCSI driver/persistent connection is starting later than Xsan FS. I had the same problem when I tested MetaSAN a while ago. IIRC this can be easilly tweaked editing the services PLIST files.

The fact that I did get it to work on a single controller setup does off course not mean all will work well on a a real SAN with many clients. But chances it will are good.

It turns out that the experiment works quite well, throughput is fine (considering the cheap hardware I used as server) and I guess it could further be improved with port trunking/link aggregade. WIth 10Gb Ethernet such a setup might even please those needing high bandwidth.

Why is Apple selling Xsan as fibre channel only wherea StorNext is not so restrictive?

I'm looking at the StorNext installation and user manuals,  and I don't see any references to iSCSI.  Everything is assumed to be fibre channel. 

I talked to a StorNext representative about a year ago. While he recommended us to use fibre channel (even though we do not really need the bandwidth) he said StorNext would work perfectly with everything that "shows" up as block device, be it FC, iSCSI, ATAoE. I didn't really look at the docs to confirm this is really supported.

But I'm no SAN or storage gui, thus my post here to see what you guys think about it.

Mark
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References: 
 >I've tested Xsan connected to Openfiler iSCSI target... (From: Mark <email@hidden>)
 >Re: I've tested Xsan connected to Openfiler iSCSI target... (From: "Chris Ribe" <email@hidden>)



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