Status of iSCSI

[Forrest Aldrich]

[Scott, sorry about the bounced mail - it was an old IP block I had, 
it's fixed now.]

I'm working on a project that requires a scalable mail store, which is 
poised to support 25k users initially, but scale to 100's of thousands 
of users.

The budget won't provide for a SAN right now; iSCSI is a little new, but 
unfortunately it's not supported in FreeBSD at this time.

I've been looking into the storage market areas specifically of Linux 
and/vs FreeBSD.   A Linux/NAS/iSCSI model and that of a FreeBSD/NAS/NFS 
model -- not sure we want to do direct storage at this time, if we did, 
we'd need to plan how that purchased hardware would fit into a larger plan.

NAS has the advantage of being independent; some have their own OS and 
most have redundancies in place. 
I'm not sure if  it's possible to dual-attach Linux or FreeBSD boxes to 
a FC fabric; a while ago, that wasn't possible.

The front-end servers will be split up into scalable groups - ie: some 
servers doing SpamAssassin, some antivirus, some MTA-in and MTA-out, etc.

The common denomenator, and driving factor of this design, is the 
backend mail store.   I'd like to explore what (realistic) options 
FreeBSD may have here - as I dread the thought of Linux-anything in this 
scenario.

All input/feedback welcomed.



Forrest





There was an implementation done by Lucent last year for 4.x, but it has
a sticky license and is probably out of date. I and several others see
iSCSI as something that really needs to get done, but the 3-4 months of
development time is more than can be done on evenings and weekends. I
would also want to do it 'right' and implement new infrastructure in CAM
to accompany it rather than making it monolithic like the Lucent
implementation.

What kind of project do you need it for, and what kind of resources do
you have right now?

Scott


Forrest Aldrich wrote:
 > I read the April 2004 report (on freebsd.org); presuming that's
 > up-to-date, it may be a while before we have iSCSI support in FreeBSD.
 > I wanted to verify here, etc.
 >
 > I'm involved in a project that will require something of that nature.
 >
 >
 > Thanks,
 > Forrest
 >