Question : Problem: ISCSI Freenas setup

Hi I have a similar question to question ID:24338247, I have a small office with 12 users, producing cad drawings / architectural images / renders etc. I am after finding out about iscsi and the best way to set this up.

My idea is to put all my large images / renders onto the freenas box and allow all my users access. my current server is poweredge 2800 with SBS2003 which is getting short on room, i was planning on linking the server to the freenas with ISCSI, formatting the drive with NTFS then allowing the server to share the drive. My question is whether this is the best way to set up this kind of system?

Answer : Problem: ISCSI Freenas setup

I have no experience with your suggested setup, but at least look into
as I have no windows systems.

having the NAS & SBS server on their OWN network adapter (1 Gbit),
not mixing the data with normal network traffic (i.e. use a wildly different IP address range for connection between the two, use a separate Gbit switch).

See that all equipment on that net allows for and is configured to use JUMBO frames (~10K ethernet packets) network interfaces of SBS server, NAS  and SWITCH.

A network disk like you suggest would only give access the ISCSI disk to 1 system (it is just like a disk).

If you want to give more systems access to the storage then use a SMB/CIFS share on the storage appliance, that would allow for multiple systems access the info through a mapped drive.
So it depends on your exact requirements.

(Sharing a disk between two or more independent systems requires some kind of coordination schema, there are only few systems that implement such a system:
OpenVMS Clustering and GFS clustering, both depening on a distributed lock manager to "Get It Right", coordinated random access of multiple systems to one shared resource (like a multipath accessible disk).
Random Solutions  
 
programming4us programming4us