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So for starters, fire up your iSCSI storage and share it out. However, we’ve also tested LeftHand, Isilon, OpenFiler, iSCSI Target (from Microsoft) and many others (including dozens of appliances) with the Mac. For the purpose of this article we’re going to use the SNS globalSAN software.For the purposes of this howto, we’re using the free version of software called Starwind from RocketDivision. Software based initiators will use the CPU of your system and a built-in or third party standard Ethernet port, but you can also buy a dedicated card which will offload the processing power to the card, which in some cases will be required for various performance reasons. Alternatively you can also look into the Atto Xtend SAN, which runs about $200 for 1 user with volumes discount slashing the prices to about $90 for 100 users. Studio Network Solutions (SNS) provides a software-based iSCSI initiator called globalSAN that can be downloaded and used free of charge from their site. As with Xsan, to get started with iSCSI you’ll need an initiator and a target.
Iscsi globalsan mac os#
While you can use pretty much any Ethernet switch, I’d recommend that if you’re going to use iSCSI that you dedicate a switch to it, or use quality switches and build a dedicated VLAN for your iSCSI traffic.Recently, I’ve recently been seeing a lot of traffic about whether or not you can use iSCSI with Mac OS X. This allows you to leverage Ethernet, a low cost network medium to get SAN performance and network based storage.
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ISCSI is a network storage protocol that allows sending and receiving of SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network.
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