Like iSCSI, metaLAN is block level sharing as well. The biggest difference to me aside from the all of the technical stuff under the hood is that iSCSI doesn't really gain you anything on its own if your intention is to share the same volume amongst multiple clients. To the best of my understanding, connecting via iSCSI is the same as connecting via fibre channel in that you need SAN software to keep your filesystem from exploding. metaLAN handles all of this as part of the system. It's one price for one product.
And in response to the other ethernet storage sharing products... I've yet to find any other product outside of Tiger's offerings that's explicitly advertised as fully supporting the Autodesk linux distributions. Without such support, those products are complete and total non-options in my company's facility.
R. Adam Berk
Managing Director
Creative Technology San Francisco
http://www.CT-SF.com
