SORT BY:

LIST ORDER
THREAD
AUTHOR
SUBJECT


SEARCH

IPS HOME


    [Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

    RE: Are there any coming iSCSI HBAs? Preferably at 100Mb speed?




    Bob,

    I think that we where referring to a different environment that uses 100Mb/s for home and can connect some old or new disks to some "older PC's" and get inexpensive arrays that can be shared.

    Julo


    Robert Snively <rsnively@Brocade.COM>
    Sent by: owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu

    15/04/03 05:52

    To
    Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL, Robert Snively <rsnively@Brocade.COM>
    cc
    ips@ece.cmu.edu, owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu, Russell Lewis/Tucson/IBM@IBMUS
    Subject
    RE: Are there any coming iSCSI HBAs? Preferably at 100Mb speed?





    Julian,
     
    The stated environment was a diskless home system with disks remote.
     
    Home system means broadband attachment at less than 1.5 Mb/sec from
    the home to the remote iSCSI device, so it really doesn't matter how
    fast your local connection is (10 Mb/s or 100 Mb/s, you only get 1.5 Mb/s max)
     
    Been there, done that, it is not so hot, unless system, swap, and
    program are local, meaning not diskless.  Dataless with NFS works
    okay, because all the operational functions run locally and only file
    access runs remotely, and that does not require iSCSI (and in fact works better
    without iSCSI for comparable technology).
     
    The stated environment was legacy, which means there is no administrative
    tool or specialized file system to allow the use of shared remote storage.
     
    I absolutely agree that native SCSI disks will perform better than IDE disks attached
    via local or remote iSCSI.
     
    Bob
    -----Original Message-----
    From:
    Julian Satran [mailto:Julian_Satran@il.ibm.com]
    Sent:
    Monday, April 14, 2003 4:36 PM
    To:
    Robert Snively
    Cc:
    ips@ece.cmu.edu; owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu; 'Russell Lewis'
    Subject:
    RE: Are there any coming iSCSI HBAs? Preferably at 100Mb speed?


    Bob,


    I wonder if your opinion is based on real experience or prejudice.

    Our measurements indicate that an inexpensive box with SCSI disks performs BETTER than an IDE (typical) desktop drive

    using iSCSI over a 100MB/s connection (widely available for home use) - and that includes paging (usually marginal) and all the rest.


           Julo


    Robert Snively <rsnively@Brocade.COM>
    Sent by: owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu

    14/04/03 18:06


    To
    Russell Lewis/Tucson/IBM@IBMUS, ips@ece.cmu.edu
    cc
    Subject
    RE: Are there any coming iSCSI HBAs?  Preferably at 100Mb speed?







    My experience with diskless workstations is that

    they are limited by paging activity and background

    updating to really unacceptable performance, even in

    simple word-processing programs like frame maker

    doing medium sized books, and even on a local 10 Mb/s

    network.

    You are far better off running a workstation with
    a local disk for system and swap, but running

    dataless.  NFS or comparable networking programs

    run fine for that.  The local caching of the files

    on disk and in memory assure adequate performance, while

    the maintenance of your data remotely assures
    appropriate centralized data management and backup.

    Remember too, that it is a rare broadband connection
    that gives you anything approaching 100 Mb/s.  A T1 DSL link

    is specified at 1.54 Mb/s, and it is the fastest of the

    common broadband links.

    In addition, there is nothing more frustrating than being
    unable to operate because your link is down or severely

    congested, something that happens far more often than the
    unavailability of a local disk.

    My view?  iSCSI is not an appropriate protocol for home
    networking data access.  Use your IDE or SATA drive locally
    for boot, swap, system, and any hot programs and use

    NFS or other remote file access program against a remote

    server for data and other programs.

    Bob Snively
    408-333-8135

    rsnively@brocade.com

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: Russell Lewis [
    mailto:russelll@us.ibm.com]
    > Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 9:25 AM

    > To: ips@ece.cmu.edu

    > Subject: Are there any coming iSCSI HBAs? Preferably at 100Mb speed?

    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    > Does anybody know of any current or coming iSCSI HBAs which
    > show up (to the

    > BIOS) as ordinary SCSI adapters?  I'd like to drop such an HBA into a

    > legacy computer and run a totally diskless workstation at home.

    >
    > However, since it will be a home computer, I'm willing to
    > operate at 100Mb

    > speed - I'm willing to eat the performance hit.  It seems to me that

    > somebody could make an iSCSI HBA with a 100Mb interface and make it

    > affordable for the home user (say, $50-$100).  Anybody know
    > of such plans?

    >
    >



Home

Last updated: Tue Apr 15 12:19:18 2003
12501 messages in chronological order