Hi everybody, I admit I'm not following this list with enough attention lately, so what I'm about to say might already have been proposed and discussed. Sorry if this is the case.
The other day I was evaluating the possibility to build an home-made iSCSI SAN based on Linux, old PC and gigabit NICs. It occurred to me that should be possible to cram more HDs in a single pc if I could put my hands on an hybrid IDE - Ethernet card, that would carry on-board a 1Gb Ethernet adapter plus and IDE controller, some RAM (for buffering) and either a tcp/iscsi hardware engine (which might be expensive and difficult to make) or some kind of embedded cpu that runs a stripped down linux (or something akin) kernel and is able to drive the ethernet and the IDE controller. The overall architecture could be optimized to provide an high-bandwidth data path between the ide controller and the network interface. This way it could be possible to plug the card into an oldish pc, attach an IDE (or SATA or what alse) HD and the network cable to it and off we go. The main PC would have to do next to nothing when the whole thing is used for remote access, but should be able to see the drives and the nics as drives and network cards (d'oh!) so it could be possible to run applications that need the data on the same machine, using iSCSI on localhost. This way you can just buy (or refurbish) a bunch of PCs, then if you need processing power you can fit them with a NIC and access the remote storage, if you need storage you can fit them with the 'san card' and if you need both (but you want it able to scale in the future, both in processing power and in disk size) you don't need to buy separate boxes from the beginning. This kind of product is obviously not suited to high-end usage, but I think it would work well in a SOHO environment. Or at least I would find it useful at home :-) I'm thinking about professionals and small businesses that need some kind of centralized, organized storage but do not have the resources necessary to really go pro. Any idea/comments about this? Would it be feasible to implement it? Cheers, Pierluigi Rolando _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
