Hi All,

i tried Googling for answer, but surprisingly found no hits.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of using an iSCSI RAID1 configuration -- with one local and one remote, or possibly N remote mirrors -- as opposed to using CODA, GFS, etc?

i guess one distinction is that iSCSI works at block level, and other distributed filesystems work at file level...but how does that pan out in real life? Is one necessarily faster than the other?

tia

I am not an expert by any means, but your going to be hamstringed by network throughput in both cases. The difference as you you said is file vs block level access. Some might argue there is more overhead with file access instead of block, but with today's computers you'd likely never notice it. It boils down to how you want the storage treated in my opinion. DO you want a "Hard Drive" (iSCSI), or do you want a shared drive (file access)

I am not that expert as well

But I think that the main differences are :

1. it's a block device sharing vs filesystem sharing, so you can make partitioning, volume management, creating filesystem over the shared block device but in the filesystem sharing you cannot make this, you only use the shared files by this filesystem, and in the filesystem sharing you stuck with the filesystem restrictions and permissions .

2. with ISCSI you can send SCSI commands to a remote disk "shared by ISCSI over IP" but with filesystem sharing you cannot

3. ISCSI is the cheaper alternative to the SAN technology and it's over IP address "doesn't need Fiber Channel"

I hope that helps you