Quick iSCSI question

mosfet

mosfet

mosfet

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A friend of mine at a company I used to work for just inquired about the new Drobo Pro which has iSCSI functionality, but I don't know anything about iSCSI.

If it (or any other iSCSI storage) is attached to a switch, can multiple workstations connect to it over iSCSI, or can you only have one connected initiator?

ie. would you need a dedicated server serving as the middle man between iSCSI storage boxes and workstations?

Cheers
 
I read up as much as I could before asking, including that page, but I want to make absolutely sure, in plain English what it means, since I know virtually nothing about enterprise storage.

If I have multiple workstations (all running iSCSI initiator software) connected to a gigabit switch and I connect an iSCSI storage device (such as the Drobo Pro) to that same switch, can my workstations all connect to and access the storage device concurrently?
 
Well that's why my ears pricked up when I heard about it, the combination of professional features at a low price with idiot-proof features.

They're a small company (25 employees) with who have no technical staff at all, use a huge amount of data and use consumer, external hard drives for everything.

I worked there for a few months during my placement year and was pretty embarrassed by the situation. I tried to get them to invest in an low-end enterprise solution from a brand name, but they were entirely apathetic to the tune of "if it ain't broke", despite the fact that dropping one of their unbacked up consumer drives would cost them clients.

I thought that a couple of Drobo Pros in the comms rack plugged in to the main switch might be the ideal solution.
 
Funny you mention Fibre Channel, they did actually get a quote recently for an FC setup which was massively overspecced and way out of their budget. They don't need speed at all, just a central, idiotproof box to dump their clients' data incase some numpty drops a drive or kicks over a workstation.

I looked in to Drobo failure horror stories, and AFAIK provided you transplant the drives in to another Drobo with the same or newer firmware then you're fine. Personally I'd want a pair of them on a UPS, with one providing nightly backups of the other.

iaind said:
Why would iSCSI be of use in that situation though?
Click to expand...

Because Drobo had already caught my eye and the company already had a robust gigabit-switched network running to every room.
 
iaind said:
Would you not want to be running it as a NAS though? As was mentioned earlier, you risk corruption if its just going to be serving out files.
Click to expand...

That's why I started this thread :)

growse said:
This is exactly why for small setups, I wouldn't bother with proprietary hardware RAID where if the controller fails you need to get another one before you can recover data. Hook everything up to a generic x86 box as single drives and soft-raid it with LVM or ZFS and if the host goes bang, you can run the same drives on a completely different box running the same (free) software. If you need performance, that's a different story, but then you've probably got $$$ to throw around.
Click to expand...

This is exactly the route I wanted to take, but for a company with no technical staff *at all* it seemed that the chance of me getting a phone call every week because they can't figure out how to do something was a little too high. Something like a Drobo is tempting because even the people there would understand "Green Light = Good, Red Light = Put a new drive in".
 
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