[BBLISA] iSCSI - opinions / experiences?

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Eddy Harvey wrote:

>
> Also, I spent a fair amount of time measuring file i/o over nfs, and
> generally found it 1/8 to 1/10 as fast as block-level network access.  I
> dare you to measure and compare.  Even with some serious tweaking of
> parameters, or switching to udp instead of tcp, nfs is much slower than
> block-level access.  In both cases I was running the i/o across a gigabit
> ethernet.
>

OK, but how do I use a SAN to replace NFS? If I have multiple computers, 
doesn't each computer have to be assigned it own partitions on the SAN, so 
that the SAN doesn't enable file sharing across computers, only disk 
sharing? I haven't looked carefully into SANs for exactly that reason - or 
have I been wrong? I'd be interested in the speed improvement if the files 
could be shared.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg at nber.org
617-588-0343