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iSCSI for Mac OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the hoping-apple-fills-this-gap-soon dept.

CoffeePlease asks: "Is anyone aware of development going on for iSCSI drivers for Mac OS X? I really need this but it's only out for Windows and Linux so far. I can't use the Linux drivers - they might run, but only as a command-line process, and I need other software to recognize the drives."

3 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Not to my knowledge by Matthias+Wiesmann · · Score: 4, Informative
    • There is no mention of iSCSI on apple's site, and I never heard of apple supporting iSCSI.
    • You cannot run Linux drivers on Mac OS X, drivers is one area where Darwin is very different from Linux. You might have more luck with BSD drivers.
    • Running the drivers as command line makes little sense: drivers don't have much interfaces. You might need the command line to start or install drivers.
    • Assuming an iSCSI driver existed for Mac OS X / Darwin, then the system could see a remote device and handle it. Assuming the file-system on this device would be supported by Darwin then all applications, with or without GUI would 'see' this file-system.
  2. Re:oh, whatever by aderusha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    1) firewire - no managment, just loose drives attached to single machines. might as well suggest a usb memory stick. firewire drives don't make a san.

    2) fibre channel - cost of entry approaching $50k. that adds up to about 50k reasons not to use it on a home machine or small network.

    3) network storage - not really a block level disk access technology, is it?

    i think the real reason is that very few people are using macs in a data center serving up real applications to lots of clients - the sorta place where a well managed SAN makes sense. now that the draft standard has been finalized (but not ratified), i imagine that you'll see iSCSI becoming more commoditized and more software being made available for more OSs.

    note that the windows and linux software packages are only iSCSI initiators - i haven't seen any software based iSCSI targets. this means that even if you did port the code to Darwin you'd still have to have some storage device out there speaking iSCSI to point your mac at.

  3. Let me get this right... by hmccabe · · Score: 4, Funny

    it's called iSCSI and it's on every platform but Apple's? It seems a bit like Apple naming rendezvous GnuIPdetect.