KWLUG Meeting: Monday April 6 2009

How much disk space do you have? And how much disk space do you need? If you're like me the answers are "not enough" and "more". Our digital age has lead to increasing use of disk space to hold media of all kinds. Our photo album is the computer, our video library is also there and our file cabinet is slowly creeping onto that disk as well. It's all precious data that just continues to grow and grow.

Managing data is becoming a common need for today's households and a burden for companies. It needs to be more simple and less expensive and more reliable than before.

iSCSI is a technology that shares disk devices over Ethernet. Disks shared using iSCSI appear as block devices to clients and can be treated as such. This flexibility in providing disk space to systems is what has been used for years in very expensive corporate data centres. iSCSI is bundled with Linux so this same technology is right at your fingertips.

iSCSI is not a file system, it's a device sharing protocol that has significant possibilities. Imagine all the computers in your house booting from a single disk, without any special O/S requirements.

The presentation starts with a discussion of what iSCSI is and where it can be useful. You'll see real-time demonstrations setting up iSCSI. And you'll be tempted with discussions of advanced configurations.
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The host for this meeting was john.