If you are located in the San Francisco Bay area, you may be interested in this upcoming event in March. It's open and free to the public, and pizza and beer will be catered by NetApp.
March 16, 2006 Location: Network Appliance HQ, Building 3, 495 E. Java Dr Sunnyvale, CA 94089 Time: 7:00-10:00pm
http://www.mollyguard.com/event/25445107
IP Storage Today and Tomorrow Speaker: David Dale, Network Appliance iSCSI Evangelist and Chair of the SNIA IP Storage Forum
This session will highlight the progress made with iSCSI over the past 3 years and how next-generation features such as multi-connection sessions and ErrorRecoverLevel>0 are pushing iSCSI into more demanding application environments. Dave will also talk about where you can expect to see iSCSI next. (hint: think departmental Linux and UNIX environments)
The Kilo-Client 1000 Host Swarm Speakers: Gregg Ferguson, Laboratory Administrator, and David Brown, Engineering Support Manager, of the NetApp Engineering Gregg and David from the NetApp RTP (Research Triangle Park) Engineering Laboratory will explain how they designed and built what is probably the world's largest iSCSI-based diskless server farm (1,000 nodes). Alll server nodes boot from NetApp storage using iSCSI and can be rapidly rebooted to run various versions of Linux, Windows, or other operating systems. Because a single LUN is shared among many servers in this design, server provisioning is almost unlimited.
This session will describe the server farm in detail and discuss how particular technologies were chosen.