[Cialug] Best Local SAN performance

[kristau]

Taking a huge step back, iSCSI and NFS are not even close to the same
animals.

iSCSI, along with protocols such as Infiniband and FiberChannel, present
raw, block storage to their "clients" and are typically set up 1-to-1 where
a single client or host sees a single set of blocks (LUN or UUID,
typically). Think "The host sees this storage as a dedicated, internal hard
disk (even though it may physically be 1 or more kilometers away)." These
protocols sit "underneath" the filesystem (ext2fs, NTFS, ZFS, etc).

NFS, along with protocols such as SMB and AFP, present multi-client shares
to the network and are best suited for many-to-1 storage where a lot of
clients need to see the same files. Think "All these hosts need to see
these files over the network (be that LAN, WAN, or beyond)." These
protocols sit "on top of" the filesystem.

There are exceptions to this, but they typically come with fairly
specialized management solutions which are separate from (read: sit on top
of) the iSCSI or NFS protocols. For example, vSphere hosts can "share"
iSCSI targets. vSphere hosts can also use NFS storage. The abstraction
layer in both cases, however, is the Datastore which provides locking
"above" the iSCSI or NFS protocol so that the hosts cannot clobber each
other's data.

It is also common to have an iSCSI "back end" storage array presented by a
host which shares out to the network at the "front end" via NFS. It all
boils down to your use case. You may actually end up using both!

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 11:39 AM L. V. Lammert <lvl at omnitec.net> wrote:

> Going to build anternal "SAN" four our dev machines, .. would anyone have
> input on which protocol would provide the best performance?
>
>         * iSCSI
>         * NFS
>         * ??
>
> Thanks!
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