NetApp Adds iSCSI Boot Support for Unix, Linux, and Windows

Published: April 6, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Network storage vendor Network Appliance said that it would support booting from storage area networks using the iSCSI protocol and standard Ethernet networking rather than requiring more expensive Fibre Channel connectivity. The iSCSI boot support for SANs, which NetApp calls IP SAN, has been enabled for Solaris, Linux, and Windows.

Booting from the SAN using iSCSI, instead of having local disk drives running operating system and middleware images, is a great way to make servers more resilient and to simplify backing up and restoring server images in complex clusters of machines. "Customers are showing enormous interest in using iSCSI storage for their high-density server and departmental Unix environments," explained Rich Clifton, vice president and general manager of the networked storage business unit at NetApp. "With native iSCSI host software and boot-from-SAN support more customers will be able to deploy iSCSI in these environments, just as native iSCSI support in Windows opened up more opportunity for iSCSI adoption."

NetApp says that it has qualified the iSCSI software initiator and the native MPxIO multipathing I/O driver for the Solaris 10 implementation of Unix from Sun Microsystems; it is unclear when AIX or HP-UX will get similar support, but it cannot be far behind. NetApp said that it is supporting this functionality in Linux, but it is unclear which distributions have this support yet, if any at all. Microsoft and IBM announced this week that they had worked together to create the software to allow a Windows server to boot off a SAN using iSCSI, and NetApp is making use of this software for Windows support.