iSCSI is not limited to Dell. It's an open standard with
implementations from most of the big players in servers and storage.
It basically allows SCSI bus traffic over IP but with some significant
modifications (no 15 device limit comes to mind) that make it more
suitable for SAN type deployments. In Theory, this gives you WAN
access to your storage network. In practice it's admittedly quite a
bit more complicated than that. If you have a decent gigabit switch
with enough bandwidth on the backplane (or switching fabric if you
prefer) through trunking or bonding if you prefer, -(essentially
ethernet port aggregation) you can link multiple Gig E interfaces
together. This raises the reasonable theoretical throughput limits to
2-4Gbps assuming 2 way trunking between servers on the same switch.
If you're running a smaller shop, a good switch, extra ethernet cards
and cables will run you less than a fiber switch and fiber adaptors
for each server and *may* be suitable for some database needs. No SAN
implementation is without some pain but iSCSI is gaining some traction
in the industry and with 10G Ethernet on the horizon, the future looks
promising. The biggest benefit over traditional fiber is lower cost
all around.
Disclaimer: I am not currently running iSCSI in my shop. We use
traditional DAS (Direct Attached Storage) for our critical data with
some NAS for non-essential / archival / backup purposes.
Here's a couple of quick links to get you started but I'll leave it to
you to do your own research. Good luck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iscsi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_trunking
Micah
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