“I got a long way into the project before it sank in that there were several new blind alleys”

As Steve prepares for the mother of all migrations, he explains the virtues of iSCSI and the sins of Apple’s OS X

- STEVE CASSIDY

You may recall that, just before taking a break from normal subjects to address the likely technological impacts of a global war, I was idly announcing a future intention to upgrade my principal file store.

Let me run over the size and shape of this job. First of all, let's hear it for my principal Windows file server here, a little HP ML115 small business server, tweaked up just the way I like it. Lots of memory, an internal RAID made up of 750GB disks and a boot volume residing on an early SATA SSD.

There’s also a four-port add-on gigabit Ethernet card, and this gives a clue to what this notionally humble and certainly old machine has going for it. This wasn't my main file store with just the disks mounted inside its cutesy casing: this was my iSCSI presentation layer.

I built it up with the help of a modern 10GbE-capable switch from Netgear and a grab-bag of diverse small business NAS devices - mostly the now extinct Lenovo four-drive ix200 series, but also a revolving set of Netgear and Synology two-drive devices. All they had to do was support operating as an iSCSI target, which in the obscure jargon of the storage world means that they can reserve a chunk of their disk array as a place for network-connected initiators to connect and lay out storage volumes in their own native partition and volume format.