[olpc-software] iSCSI initiator on OLTP

[Sankaran, Balasundaram]

One need not go for iSCSI shared storage. Instead the iSCSI Target can
be configured so that each OLPC client will have access to one or more
LUN's exclusively. The user/admin can put whatever filesystem on those
LUN's.
-Bala

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Cox [mailto:alan at redhat.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 5:53 PM
To: Sankaran, Balasundaram
Cc: olpc-software at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [olpc-software] iSCSI initiator on OLTP

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 10:54:00AM +0530, Sankaran, Balasundaram wrote:
> I would like to know if having iSCSI initiator software would help in
> extending the storage capability of the OLTP ?
> Though the same objective can be achieved by NFS, iSCSI is more CPU
> efficient in providing access to the storage.
> I am imagining/assuming the school/community center would provide a
> common iSCSI target to which all the OLTP Laptops will connect to.

iSCSI shared storage means a cluster file system. NFS does not have that
problem. iSCSI also sucks in a large chunk of code and is complex while
NFS
is well understood. Linux also supports much more flexible transports
for
block disk access - notably nbd and ATAoE both of which are tiny in 
comparison. I would expect the best results to come from NFS. 

Alan