NASLite Network Attached Storage

Have never used iscsi, but was hoping it might offer some advantage to those of us dealing with really large quantities of small files.

I had brought up this same subject in the past, IE. support for iSCSI. The problem lies in the fact that is creates a how new level of hardware needs from what I can tell since the overhead of the network and the iSCSI protocol will both need allot of processor ticks. Another way to look at this is from the aspect that you can simply load the iSCSI initiator on your windows machine and directly attach to the file system being exported by the iSCSI server, no need for a NAS in between. I don't really know that performance will be that good but for 99% of us it would be more than enough one would think. I just see it as another level of complexity that isn't needed for Joe user.

Mike

Well that gets shot down - given the extremely underpowered hardware we have here

Then again, I thought hardware iscsi cards were out there for offloading these tasks? I mean, we use a lot of really old laptops here...and never give much thought to the fancy hardware included within the NIC cards.

True that there are offload engines in some of the better NICs to help with throughput but, and this is a big but, they have a HUGE market for the chipsets since ethernet is the ubiquitous network interface standard and is included on just about every device known to man.

Not so with iSCSI, I liken it to FC-AL and infiniband in that it is a very niche market product. The fact that it is so new and still under development means that hardware will be hard to find and very expensive.

Mike