iSCSI or Fibre

[Gary_Jones]

I'm a massive fan of iSCSI due to its cost benefits , but there are several things many people forget.

1. ISCSI is really aimed at Client to NAS/SAN connections, not NAS to NAS. If you are linking NAS / SAN devices together, use fibre most are designed with Fibre in mind. Clients should ideally use iSCSI though, if they are within 24 meters of the NAS / Switch as it saves you an absolute ton on HBA cards and also doesn't carry the risk that adding another piece of hardware to the equation does.
2. Use gigabit or don't bother
3. Make sure you use CAT6 cables for Gig and that they are less than 24 meters (25 meters and above is a no no for Gig iSCSI)
4. If you can, use multimode trunking for machines with massive disk activity (busy SQL servers etc).

[threaded]

What an odd co-incidence! At one of the clients I set a machine to essentially do a grep across a monster multiterabyte collection of logs for the last week and a bit, and the fibre router burnt out, which they replaced yesterday. Poor thing just couldn't take it capt'n. Apparently when the tech. opened the cabinet he was surprised by how warm it was in there.

So as well as speed, you might want to look at sustained throughput, and what cooling needs are required.

And you want full duplex.

[lilelvis2000]

I cross my fingers and pray..Today one of the neighbour tenents came into the office with his external USB hard drive. Apparently it wasn't working on his machine. I plugged into mine and Windows reported a power surge..his drive is dead. Three years of backup gone! (I just hope my USB port isn't damaged)

I backup what I can to DVD. Dunno what I'm gonna use when I get my 500GB NAS box up and running. A cheap tape drive?

[bellymonster]

Try this....

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...re-channel.htm

[miffy]

Does depend on the solution.

Small scale iSCSI is fine. Medium to enterprise always Fibre.

Oops, forgot to add: NetApp or HP StorageWorks. Backup whatever the client has, if nothing then HP Dataprotector is the puppy.

[n5gooner]

iSCSI or Fibre - what do people out there use for their SAN / Storage / Backup solutions ??