I think I will look back at this as my iSCSI summer. Barely being able to spell it a few months ago, I've spent the summer putting all of our iSCSI storage arrays to the test and you can see the results in our Storage section. I've had the pleasure of running serious tests on our Dell/EMC CX3-20c (which also supports Fibre Channel), our Dell PowerVault NX1950 (which also supports NFS and CIFS), and, most recently, our Dell PowerVault MD3000i, a pure iSCSI box with a great price and simple management tools that Michael and the storage team announced this past Monday. (I'm actually not on a first name basis with Mr. Dell as Scott is; it's just what we call him around here).

For the NX1950 Todd and I ran a test where we showed that the array with 45 disks could handle the key storage needs - mail, database, file serving - for a 1000-employee company!

For the MD3000i (which is not really a box - the brains are in the controller cards inside the disk pod) I showed that the storage requirements of 5 servers - both the active and passive nodes of an Exchange continuous cluster replication configuration, a web server, a database server, a file server - can be consolidated on an MD3000i with 45 disks, while backups were being taken off the Exchange passive node.

In both these studies we ran 8-hour full stress tests. These are not marketing slides! (With apologies to our buddies in marketing).

While I was doing this work I collected screen shots, especially around setting up multipathed connections to all of these arrays for failover and load balancing with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. All the detail you could ever want is here. (I know, I owe you open source guys some Linux MPIO stuff - hope to get to that soon).

Well, you won't see me hanging around the ol' wiki for too much longer today since that great institution, the Austin City Limits Music Festival (known to those of us cool people simply as "ACL") starts in a few hours. Six stages including the Dell stage and the AMD stage (this is Austin, remember). Decisions, decisions. Joss Stone or Crowded House (I'm going for Joss). Steve Earle or Stephen Marley. Arcade Fire or Cross Canadian Ragweed. This is the only place you will find Bjork and Charlie Musselwhite on the same bill (I know, you younger cats will have to look up who that is). The one thing I know is I will be at the AMD stage at 4:30 on Sunday for Lucinda Williams. Wouldn't miss her.

Dave