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Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:26:58 -0500
From: Craig Boston <craig@feniz.gank.org>
To: Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il>
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Cc: Matthew Jacob <lydianconcepts@gmail.com>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: iSCSI HBAs
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On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 03:35:52PM +0300, Danny Braniss wrote:
> being involved with the iSCSI initiator for FreeBSD, I can't see where
> this can help for a diskless host, or in other words, what's
> wrong with NFS?

Well, for one thing since iSCSI is designed for SAN use, the filesystem
can safely assume that nothing else is accessing it concurrently and do
a lot more aggressive caching.  NFS has to play it safe and check with
the server every time a file is accessed to make sure it hasn't changed.

It sounds to me like the OP is thinking about servers in a large data
center booting off an iSCSI SAN.  Makes migrating off of dead hardware
to a new machine (or even a VM) a snap.

> also, the TOE cards are not that cheep either :-) my 2c, danny

They're usually cheaper than fibre channel HBAs though ;-)

Craig