Adaptec shows off SCSI over TCP/IP

AT IDF this year, Adaptec had a nice stand, and was showing a lot of high end storage toys. Some were things you would recognize, others were more geared at high end applications that you most likely don't have much contact with. One of the more interesting ones was an iSCSI adaptor, and the associated support pieces.

For those of you who aren't up on cutting edge enterprise storage formats, iSCSI is basically SCSI over TCP/IP. You can connect your drives to your PC using TCP/IP as your signaling protocol. This allows you to have your drive array in a box beside your computer, across the room, down the hall, in the basement, or four countries away. Nice idea, and I hear it works well.

The twist that Adaptec clued me into was that there was now BIOS support for booting over iSCSI. Think about that for a second. It has the potential to be Ghost on steroids.

You have your a copy of your boot image on a remote server, say a little NAS box in your basement. In the BIOS, you have the boot order being 1 - HD0, 2 - iSCSI //server1/bootimages/yourimage. There is some real interesting power available there, and some evil ricks you can pull if you are the admin of the box with the boot images. µ