22 May , 08:38 AM
Derek Schwab is an admin at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, GA. He's got a couple short and sweet pointers for optimizing the network for an iSCSI SAN.
As Derek says: "I’ve had a couple of vendors tell me iSCSI is not an enterprise solution and I’d never see over 250Mbps of throughput. I love proving them wrong."
I just came across this post and wanted to point out that I made a followup post regarding switching hardware. In short, we are using a Cisco Catalyst 6506 switch. More details, including the exact modules I'm using are located at http://www.derekschwab.com/2008/05/networking-for-iscsi.html
He didn't say in his blog, so I asked him on his site.
What networking product was this running on? Dell switch?
If a vendor is really saying things like "you'll never see over 250Mbps with iSCSI" then that vendor is crazy. Our old fiber channel vendor told us we'd never be able to exceed 250MB/s which, assuming only a single array and two paths is probably true. Of course my counter point was that I didn't need to exceed 250MB/s in my environment to achieve my performance goals so why should I pay for more than that? They didn't seem to understand that point.