I'd like to open a brief discussion on iSCSI. Recently, we've had two vendors tell us to abandon iSCSI. We're not using it extensively -- just investigating it for possible use in certain applications in the data center and remote offices (primarily remote offices).
Cisco, naturally, is on the "iSCSI is dead, long live FCoE" bandwagon -- hell, they're driving it. To be honest, I'm not sure I see much value in FCoE (or, more specifically, DCE) in existing data centers. It's still expensive to upgrade to it, from adding or switching to Nexus switches to adding CNA cards to every host. We also recently spoke to IBM, and they told us that they have not seen any iSCSI implementations in production in the field (granted, this was one local sales engineer). We're going to be meeting with Cisco in a few weeks, and they're going to really push their data center strategy. In the meantime, we're exploring iSCSI. We've got a lot of VMWare, which doesn't handle iSCSI as nicely as I'd like. They'll do failover, but they don't load balance nicely over multiple links, which makes 10g DCE look nice. In terms of small office, where we might deploy 2 machines running VMWare with a single shelf of disks, we could choose to attach those disks via FC, iSCSI or even SAS. In this case, iSCSI is fine since most machines come with multiple ethernet ports, but of course it'd be slower than 4gb fibre. So, I'm just curious what other people are doing with iSCSI, and what your thoughts are on DCE/FCoE. I think if you were building a data center from scratch, DCE might make some sense, though the CNA cards are still expensive. -Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
