5/8/2023 0 Comments Globalsan iscsi initiator![]() ![]() That number is spec, in the real world it’s unachievable. Bytes are eights times larger than bits so our results are mathematically corrected.įor reference, a standard GigE connection is theoretically 1000Mb/s (or 125MB/s). It should be noted before I go any further that the results of the Blackmagic Speed Test are in bytes not bits as networks are typically measured so don’t misread the graphics. In short, iSCSI is all it is claims to be. We tested iSCSI vs CIFS using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. The server and client are the only two systems on the test network. ![]() As a control, we also enabled a CIFS share to the same disk and share point on the FreeNAS server. iSCSI requires special client software on Macs, so we used GlobalSAN’s iSCSI initiator (client software) for what is essentially a client side driver (called an initiator in iSCSI speak). On the client side, we used a new MacBook Pro outfitted with an SSD that’s also rated for far more write speed than the gig network could deliver. ![]() We used a commodity Netgear GS108E gigabit network switch and an EdgeRouter to provide DNS and DHCP. We setup the iSCSI service in FreeNAS to target an internal SSD rated 4800Mb/s, well above the threshold of the gigabit sandbox network we built to deliver data to our MacBook Pro. FreeNAS, if you’ve never used it, is an amazing FreeBSD distro that essentially turns any system into a powerful storage appliance. To benchmark iSCSI we built a FreeNAS server to act as our storage array. It does all of this over standard, regular CAT 6 cables and regular every day gigabit switches. The connection is “block level” as opposed to “file level” therefore the connections are faster and more efficient as well as less taxing on your machine. There’s a lot of very high tech ways to describe this but simply put, iSCSI allows you to treat a NAS array as a local drive. The benefits of this are widely known to storage pros but it’s a technology that hasn’t made its way to the desktop yet, save for a few power users. After some careful analytics of our lab usage we determined that we just might squeak by with gigabit to the desktop and 10 gig to the storage. Our goal is to give the advantages of “big data” technologies to media end users that could really use the extra horsepower. We've been using a LeftHand iSCSI SAN for over two years now.ITS has begun to explore several methods that bring data center speeds closer to the edge. We have 3 XServes that access the SAN, as well as about 10 Linux servers, some of which form a Xen cluster. The SAN consists of a pair of HP D元20s in a mirrored failover configuration. On OS X we use GlobalSAN as the iSCSI initiator and it works extremely well. ![]() We only had a few crashes with earlier versions but the latest builds have been rock solid. They handle the Virtual IP handoff of the SAN very well in a failover scenario. The LefHand units we have are configured in RAID 5, I don't know if the newer ones support RAID 6 or not but quite frankly I don't think we would use it even if they did. By having two, the setup effectively becomes a RAID 1+5. The LeftHand SAN/iQ software supports asynchronous replication as well as snapshots, and does both quite well. They also have a neat feature in that you can set up a virtual SAN appliance in a VMWare host and use it to migrate data between SANs without purchasing any special additional hardware. SAN/iQ 8 also supports forking of snapshots, and is a huge improvement< over the previous version. My one big qualm with it is that it still has pretty crappy scripting support and we had to write our own Python wrapper over their scripting interface to make it work for our purposes. ![]()
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