[BBLISA] iSCSI - opinions / experiences?

[Steve Revilak]

> Subject: Re: [BBLISA] iSCSI - opinions / experiences?

Thanks for all the responses!  A number of you really know this stuff.
While I'm familiar with CIFS/NFS; SAN, NAS, and iSCSI thing are way
out of my comfort zone.

[disk on the end of an ethernet cable]

Thanks Adam -- that description made makes perfect sense.  It sounds
like iSCSI is a viable option hooking up disks to a single machine.


[NetApps]

In a former professional life, we had one.  I thought it was one of
the most impressive pieces of hardware I'd ever seen.  No reliability
problems -- it just worked.

Plus, the NetApp boot sequence is quite a show to watch -- on those
rare occassions where you have to reboot the filer :)


[Fedora NFS Headaches]

Under light to moderate load, Fedora NFS is actually alright.  Under
heavier loads, I've found that it simply falls apart.  Specifically,
this seemed to tied to operations that access large number of inodes
in rapid succession.  Running `find' or `rm -rf' across a large
nfs-mounted directory tree would produce hundreds or thousands of IO
Errors (reported by the shell command).  In a few cases, things were
hung up so badly that we had to unmount the filesystem from the
client, and restart the nfs server process to get it functional again.

Samba on Fedora has been much more reliable.  Although we've had to
take some of our java and perl programs that read across samba mounts
and put their open()'s in retry loop.  (Periodocally, attempt #1
produces an IO Error, but attempt #2 is okay).

This is Fedora <= 3.  I don't know if things have improved with 4 & 5.

Steve