February 19, 200818 yr In my everlasting quest for the best — cheap — storage solution, I stumble upon ATA over Ethernet, a somehow concurrent to iSCSI, and its vblade implementation. What seems interesting is that you can export partition like /dev/sda1 I still have to experiment with the Slackware (hint) based live CD http://www.lbserver.org/aoe/ but what I was wondering is would it be possible to use vblade to export our md partitions through user space or kernel implementation and therefore creat an hybrid nas/san on the cheap?
February 19, 200818 yr ok this is one of those posts where I understand WAY TOO FEW (esp. for someone that advertises himself as computer expert and is around computers for ~25 years now)
February 22, 200818 yr iSCSI is on Ye Olde Feature List, which would do this: let you export md devices (or files on those devices) as SCSI Lun's.
March 3, 200818 yr Author Interesting, all the software implementation of iSCSI I looked at where limited to files as target. But if Linux can indeed export block and md device like that, it is just better, since iSCSI initiator support is more common. Any idea of the timeframe for that feature (not that it will change my support of unraid in anyway) I guess it might not be that easy to efficiently do iSCSi on the md device while maintaining the parity.
March 6, 200818 yr > I guess it might not be that easy to efficiently do iSCSi on the md device while maintaining the parity. It should be just as easy. If you write to the MD device, it automatically handles all of the parity logic behind the scene. I think the unRaid subsystem would make an excellent iSCSI target. Either with LVM devices or via the MD devices. It's a protected JBOD, I don't think you could ask for more... (well I could.... I.E. if LVM were used for some of the subsystems (parity) then we can concatenate or stripe among multiple MD devices) Once 4.3 comes out with the .config file I will go to town and test out iSCSI. I'm just holding back until then. I have a nice ITX system with a duo core 2 2.33 w 4GB of ram - ready to make the leap.
March 6, 200818 yr Author I never really looked how md worked under the hood, but it does indeed seem to be feasable. If full device iSCSI export works, i will have to look into using them has harddrive for virtual machine on my other server. I could really be a real sweet setup on the cheap: One unRAID server for storage and another with Xen or something similar for the virtual machine.
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