Re: [Scst-devel] SCST vs STGT/IET/LIO

[Sebastian R. <seb...@pr...>]

On 04.04.2013 23:11, Xianghua Xiao wrote:
> Just curious, why hasn't SCST been packaged for mainstream
> Redhat/Debian/Ubuntu? It seems Redhat is using IET while Debian-family
> is by default using STGT?
> 
> Another example is that Openstack now supports IET/STGT/LIO but misses
> SCST for its block storage service.

With LIO the worst SCSI target framework made it to the mainline kernel.
RisingTide are more or less GPL violators as the stuff in mainline is
unusable for many purposes like SRP for example. SRP is even broken in
their commercial product. Those SW terrorists are implementing a kernel
code iSER target at the moment.

I don't know why there is the ib_srpt driver from SCST in the mainline
used by LIO.

The Red Hat and Suse guys seem to like LIO and Mellanox likes Red Hat.
I've seen in Israel how the Mellanox storage team worked. They generated
marketing numbers with fio instead of caring for stability. It's all
about the money and not about the technically best solution it seems.

STGT is easy to provide as it is user-space only. But Debian doesn't
provide it with iSER/RDMA support - for that compile it yourself.
Furthermore, that target doesn't support live-resizing of LUNs and
further advanced features are missing.

IET is some kind of deprecated. Too unstable and missing advanced
features IMHO.

SCST is the best SCSI target framework, very open and with very
committed maintainers. Fixes are implemented very fast after reporting a
bug. Many target drivers. This should be mainline!

And we are really like a grasshopper independent from other vendors. We
choose the technically best solution and work like a distribution
anyway. Only OpenSource works for us. If something doesn't work, we try
to fix it with the lowest effort or choose another solution. We don't
have the time or the nerves to fight other vendors like Red Hat, Oracle,
etc.
We already had the Solaris 11 COMSTAR framework and iSER in production.
ZFS completely fragmented, IPoIB and therefore iSER were completely
unstable. And the open-iscsi DDoS attack reconnect gave us the rest to
switch over to SCST and SRP.

Cheers,
Sebastian