Jason Lee

What to do when you have 100s of gb of data on a local drive and no where to put it while you reload the OS drive?

We have some extra space on the SAN and the Mac Pros have a second Ethernet port so it got me thinking.  Could we make an iSCSI connection to the SAN from the Mac Pro and use our SAN for this project?

First we had to figure out if there is even a MAC OSX iSCSI  initiator.  Ed Buford pointed me to Studio Solutions.  They offer a free globalSAN iSCSI initiator that works with their hardware, but also offer a fully functioning download for use with other SANs.

We moved my Mac mini to a VLan that could access the SAN switches after we installed the software and gave it an IP in the appropriate range.  A couple mouse clicks later my Mac was asking if it should use this new huge volume as the backup for TimeMachine.  We said no to time machine and created a partition.

In our test the transfer speed was ok considering we only have a 100mb nic in the mini. This quick proof of concept has opened some new doors for how we might use our SAN in production.  For now it gives us a place to dump some needed data during a recovery.

This new development makes me wonder how bad an idea would it be to store what we are defining as level two data for our Creative arts team.  We are working thru what data needs to be immediatly and locally accessible and what data is at that second tier that needs to be online but not stored locally.  Has anyone already gone down this road to define these types of data?  I would sure be interested in learning from someone else’s experience .

Church IT