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Setting Up An iSCSI Environment On Linux | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
by 1 otherSetting Up An iSCSI Environment On Linux
Nowadays, the iSCSI technology is quite popular in the storage world. This article shows an iSCSI demo environment which consists of one Debian Linux host and one Netapp Filer.We try to show the most important features of this protocol.
1. What is iSCSI?
It is a network storage protocol above TCP/IP. This protocol encapsulates SCSI data into TCP packets. iSCSI allows us to connect a host to a storage array via a simple Ethernet connection (tape drive). This solution is cheaper than the Fibre Channel SAN (Fibre channel HBAs and switches are expensive). From the host view the user sees the storage array LUNs like a local disks. iSCSI devices should not be confused with the NAS devices (for example NFS). The most important difference is that NFS volumes can be accessed by multiple hosts, but one iSCSI volume can by accessed by one host. It is similar to SCSIi protocol: usually only one host has access to one SCSI disk (the difference is the cluster enviroment). The iSCSI protocol is defined in the RFC3720 document by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).
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