To which I replied (summarized): iSCSI has nothing to do with
hardware.
iSCSI is currently only spoken to rare and expensive hardware: Ethernet disk
targets.
and I proceeded to yammer about how iSCSI is a protocol that
essentially
provides a block device over ethernet. My choice of the word "nothing"
is wrong. What I meant to say is that the actual storage mechanism
*underneath* the iSCSI provider is irrelevant, and that *no*, a user
doesn't need to go out and acquire (typically) expensive hardware that
speaks iSCSI, the user could buy cheap IDE drives and use his or her
cheap, general-purpose machine running Linux to provide the iSCSI
connectivity.
But that cheap, general-purpose machine is a few hundred dollars of hardware
that nobody would buy in the scenario you describe unless they were going to
talk iSCSI to the IDE drives. We won't see widespread acceptance of iSCSI
storage by the misers among us (like me) until you can get an iSCSI drive
for the same price as an IDE drive... Or, at least, till you can get SATA
drives for the same price as IDE and can connect them externally.
That's the point: not what can be done, but what can be done easily and at
no incremental cost.
(Of course, GFS over shared parallel SCSI is still a possibility...)
31 messages in net.sourceforge.lists.courier-usersRE: [courier-users] Disaster tolerant...
