Open Source is a key part of many of SanDisk® solutions in the data center, mobile, consumer and retail markets. Thus, working closely with the open source community and being an active part of it has been a priority for us. One of the interesting projects that we have been investing in is as project maintainers for SCST.
SCST is a GPL licensed SCSI target software stack. SCST allows the creation of sophisticated storage devices, appliances and arrays on top of any server that supports Linux. The design goals of this software stack are high performance, high reliability, strict conformance to existing SCSI standards, being easy to extend and easy to use. SCST not only supports multiple SCSI protocols (iSCSI, FC, SRP, …) but it also supports multiple local storage interfaces (SCSI pass-through, block I/O and file I/O) and also storage drivers implemented in user-space via the scst_user driver.
New Features for Generic SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux
This week the following enterprise-class features were added to http://scst.sourceforge.net/
- VAAI or vStorage API for Array Integration: Support for XCOPY has been added and the performance of WRITE SAME and of Atomic Test & Set, also known as COMPARE AND WRITE, has been improved.
- Explicit ALUA: Explicit ALUA allows an initiator system to activate a storage path after it has observed that another storage path has failed.
- Cluster support for persistent reservations: This feature is essential for initiator-side clustering approaches based on persistent reservations, e.g. the quorum disk implementation in Windows Clustering.
- T10-PI: the T10-Protection Information (PI) feature is essential to provide end-to-end data protection, which is particularly important for financial organizations.
Although an open source implementation of VAAI is available for some time now, as far as we know, SCST is the first open source project that announces support for explicit ALUA and cluster support for persistent reservations. This strengthens open source to be production capable and data center ready.
We’re excited to share these new features with the community and we plan to continue to add more enterprise-class features and to make them available for deployment by partners and users alike.
Learn more
To learn more, stay in touch with the project and get latest updates, sign up for the project mailing lists on scst.sourceforge.net
