iSCSI (revisited?)

[Danny Braniss]

> All,
> 
> I was wondering what people thought of iSCSI and FreeBSD. Is it a viable 
> option for creating SANs?
> 
refrase question.

> I want to move away from tape backups, and have numerous production 
> FreeBSD machines that I need to back up data from.
> 
for one, it depends on how deep are your pockets, 2nd the size of your data.
3rd how fast do you need to access the data, 4th from where, etc, etc, etc.

> Any other ideas for a disk to disk backup solution that people have used?
> 
We went the NAS/NFS route for most of our uses, and ONE application that has a
huge database has a fiber channel link to the filer.

The NAS is Raid4, with hot standbys, and we have not had a serious meltdown in
years. Before NAS, we had to upgrade our servers, dump|restore, and the down
times were getting larger, with the NAS, just add some disks, and no one
is the wiser, life goes on.

We still do tape backups, and move the tapes out of our premises just in case
a major disaster hist us (someone misspoint a ICBM perhaps :-)

having said all this, we are experimenting with iSCSI, and the numbers are
not bad, about the same as NFS/NAS. Still, NFS is still our prefered
solution.

danny
PS: AFAIK, there is only a iSCSI intitiator (beta), and no target for FreeBSD.