Interested in the AX150 - Couple Questions.

[CoreyWilson]

Hello all,

I am interested in the AX150 iSCSI model and have a couple questions.

First off all, are additional hard drives purchased through EMC or a supporting reseller? I am guessing they are due to the drive casing to secure them in the drive rack?

Secondly, does any have any experience with these units? We are a mid size company and looking for a SAN solution to consolidate our data. Right now we are right around 500GB of dat, which isnt a ton but our needs will quickly grow up to about 1-1.5 TB in the new year. We will be primarily hosting data, exchange store and running maybe a couple applications. I am aware that iSCSI is limited to 1gbps vs fibre's 2 or 4 but for us I think this will suffice.

Thirdly, as far as server NIC's will any 1gbps capable card work or do they need to be of specific brand / model?

Any other feedback that can be supplied would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[comtec17]

You can put any disk in there but the unit will become unsupported by EMC.

iSCSI is for applications/fileservers that need block level disk access but do not need the performance of a high performance SAN. Needless to say, if your network is not stable or over loaded today, you will suffer. It would be recommended to place the iSCSI traffic on a seperate VLAN/subnet just for SCSI traffic.

You can use any NIC with iSCSI. You only need to download and install the iSCSI initiator available by Microsoft and Cisco. Keep in mind my using standard NIC's your server performance will take a small hit when processing data. This is due to the encapsulation process of SCSI into Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel back to SCSI. You can offload this CPU hit by purchasing seperate HBA's called TOE's or TCP Offload Engines.