I recently attended the SCALE 13x conference in Los Angeles. It was my fourth time attending SCALE and as usual I found it to be an excellent event. Unlike some previous years I didn’t work in the expo hall (no CloudStack booth this year) so I had more time to watch presentations, and there were some great ones. Additionally, this year I submitted a presentation, Getting to know Linux-IO, which was accepted by the organizers!
My presentation provided a brief introduction to the Linux-IO SCSI target with an emphasis on iSCSI. Here is the abstract:
Linux-IO provides the latest and greatest SCSI target available for Linux. It is included in the Linux kernel and works with open source user space utilities. As such it does not require a specialized Linux distribution, rather it can be used with the distribution of your choice. This presentation will briefly cover the history, use cases, and technical details of Linux-IO, while the focus will be on building an iSCSI SAN using general purpose Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora. While a DIY Linux SAN might not be appropriate for every production environment, one likely can be used in testing or pre-production environments, and it can definitely be useful for sysadmins learning about storage or virtualization on a budget. With Linux-IO you can turn any PC that can run Linux into a SAN, and performance can even be good by using a cheap SSD. As it uses the iSCSI standard it is highly interoperable, for example, with hypervisors such as Linux KVM and VMware ESXi. Attendees should be comfortable with the Linux command line and with general SAN concepts and terms such as iSCSI, targets, initiators, LUNs and IQNs.
If it sounds interesting feel free to download my slides (ODP format) and watch the recorded stream on YouTube. I hope it’s useful!
https://youtu.be/WYROUzvnZ9k?t=5h31m45s
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