iSCSI and multi-terabyte support?

[pete wright]

On 10/10/07, Kurt Buff <kurt.buff at gmail.com> wrote:
> At my place of work, we're looking at implementing a SAN, most likely
> with iSCSI, some time next year, and likely about 5-10TBytes.
>
> I was wondering if FreeBSD could provide this on COTS hardware, but my
> googling hasn't been successful.
>
> >From my reading of this list over the past couple of years, it seems
> that both parts of the solution - iSCSI support and large disk support
> - are still problematic, but I'd like to hear more informed opinion,
> as the potential cost savings is quite large.
>
> Anyone have recent-ish experience putting something like this together?
>

IMHO opinion I do not think FreeBSD is there...yet.  ZFS is addressing
many of the enterprise filesystem features that would be needed to
implement something on this scale, and there is the iSCSI target from
NetBSD available in the ports tree.

I think 7-RELEASE is going to be a solid foundation for building
solutions like this - but in the mean time it may be worth considering
OpenSolaris if are considering going the COTS path.

or - you can take a look at a company like Isilon Systems
(http://www.isilon.com/) which builds very scalable filers based on
FreeBSD.  I have beta tested their iSCSI implementation and it does
look good.

HTH
-pete


-- 
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group