Olivier Galibert wrote:
On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 05:57:47PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
iSCSI and NBD were passe ideas at birth. :)
Networked block devices are attractive because the concepts and
implementation are more simple than networked filesystems... but usually
you want to run some sort of filesystem on top. At that point you might
as well run NFS or [gfs|ocfs|flavor-of-the-week], and ditch your
networked block device (and associated complexity).
Call me a sysadmin, but I find easier to plug in and keep in place an
ethernet cable than these parallel scsi cables from hell. Every
server has at least two ethernet ports by default, with rarely any
surprises at the kernel level. Adding ethernet cards is inexpensive,
and you pretty much never hear of compatibility problems between
cards.
So ethernet as a connection medium is really nice compared to scsi.
Too bad iscsi is demented and ATAoE/NBD inexistant. Maybe external
SAS will be nice, but I don't see it getting to the level of
universality of ethernet any time soon. And it won't get the same
amount of user-level compatibility testing in any case.
Indeed, at the end of the day iSCSI is a bloated cabling standard. :)
It has its uses, but I don't see it as ever coming close to replacing
direct-to-network (perhaps backed with local cachefs) filesystems...
which is how all the hype comes across to me.
Cheap "Lintel" boxes everybody is familiar with _are_ the storage
appliances. Until mass-produced ATA and SCSI devices start shipping
with ethernet connectors, anyway.
Jeff
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