In short, iSCSI is all it is claims to be. We tested iSCSI vs CIFS using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. The server and client are the only two systems on the test network. As a control, we also enabled a CIFS share to the same disk and share point on the FreeNAS server.
Iscsi globalsan driver#
iSCSI requires special client software on Macs, so we used GlobalSAN’s iSCSI initiator (client software) for what is essentially a client side driver (called an initiator in iSCSI speak). On the client side, we used a new MacBook Pro outfitted with an SSD that’s also rated for far more write speed than the gig network could deliver. We used a commodity Netgear GS108E gigabit network switch and an EdgeRouter to provide DNS and DHCP. We setup the iSCSI service in FreeNAS to target an internal SSD rated 4800Mb/s, well above the threshold of the gigabit sandbox network we built to deliver data to our MacBook Pro. FreeNAS, if you’ve never used it, is an amazing FreeBSD distro that essentially turns any system into a powerful storage appliance. To benchmark iSCSI we built a FreeNAS server to act as our storage array. It does all of this over standard, regular CAT 6 cables and regular every day gigabit switches. The connection is “block level” as opposed to “file level” therefore the connections are faster and more efficient as well as less taxing on your machine.
There’s a lot of very high tech ways to describe this but simply put, iSCSI allows you to treat a NAS array as a local drive. The benefits of this are widely known to storage pros but it’s a technology that hasn’t made its way to the desktop yet, save for a few power users. After some careful analytics of our lab usage we determined that we just might squeak by with gigabit to the desktop and 10 gig to the storage. Our goal is to give the advantages of “big data” technologies to media end users that could really use the extra horsepower. ITS has begun to explore several methods that bring data center speeds closer to the edge.
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