iSCSI is another way to share storage across a network. Well, the term iSCSI itself has more to do with the actual protocol level and the way that the data is transported across the LAN or WAN, but what it looks like as a consumer of iSCSI is that a machine has a drive letter for a disk, but that disk is not physically connected to the server. For example, you might log in to a server and see an M drive. This drive looks just like a local volume, but it is actually a network connection to storage that might be sitting on the other side of the datacenter. Sounds like a mapped network drive, right? Yes, but it works on a lower level. iSCSI virtual disks, as they are called, work with the server as if they are local disks. This gives servers the ability to interface with this data at a system level, and does not require a user context in order to work, like mapped network drives do. This is commonly referred to as block storage.

One good example that I...