Boot diskless Mac Pro from SAN/NAS/iSCSI

Question

Hi,
is there a way to a boot disk-less Mac Pro from a SAN (or NAS with iSCSI)? For reasons of security and ease of administration, we want to deploy a secure centralized storage that literally hosts the entire company in a single redundant rack. I know Windows and most Unixes can do that and wonder if there is a similar solution for Mac OS X.
Speed is not much a concern (50MB/s is ok). Therefore iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet should be fine. However, I could not find a bootable iSCSI initiator card for the Mac yet. Is there one?
Any pointers are much appreciated,
Thanks!

Answer 1

There should be no performance penalty at all. A hosted iSCSI drive over Gigabit Ethernet is not slower than a local 3.5" eSATA disk. I checked this with the globalSAN iSCSI initiator in a Mac Pro and an OpenFiler (freeware) server and the drives performed around 70-80 MB/s. Of course, if we were talking about a RAID, a local controller would be much faster, but for single disks this is ok.
The advantage is consolidation, safety and security. All drives of every Mac in an office would be hosted on a highly redundant high-availability server rack (8, 16, or even 32 drives, RAID 6, hot swappable, expandable while running, etc). Nobody would ever notice a drive failure, as it is simply replaced in the rack without downtime.
(1) Adding a new "drive" of any size to any Mac is just a matter of a minute.
(2) Hosted drives behave like a physical local disk. You can partition and format them in any way you like, use hard links (Time Machine?), install other operating systems, anything.
(3) Redundancy and data safety is guaranteed for the entire office.
(4) Backup is centralized and more reliable.
(5) Many iSCSI servers support snapshots: You could return to a previous state of your Mac at any time, as if it was a virtual machine.
(6) If the iSCSI server supports encryption, your data is still safe even if one or more of your Macs (or the server altogether) got stolen.
Usually this kind of setup is run on a fibre channel network in large data centers with hundreds of disk-less server blades and one huge SAN rack full of disk drives. Using iSCSI over cheap ethernet allows small to medium size businesses to benefit from this consolitation technique without spending the $$$ for a FC solution.
I agree that this would certainly not make sense for a single Mac, or two. However, once you have more than, say, five Macs and/or Windows machines, storage consolidation might be very useful.
If it only worked with Macs
Thanks for pointing me to another potential solution. I will carefully check that out. I however can't yet see how it would be possible to have the (read-only) boot image load the iSCSI initiatror drivers and then "redirect" the boot process to a hosted iSCSI disk. The thing is, the OS would have to be installed on a writeable iSCSI disk in order to be maintained, updated, upgraded as usual. All that storage consolidation is pointless, if the hosted drives behave like network shares rather than true local disks.