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Dell Brings SAN to the People: Page 3 of 6

Easy installation and a slick GUI are nice, but they're all for naught if the product doesn't meet expectations. Fortunately, the unit's performance impressed us too. We copied a 500MB file from an iSCSI-connected server to our test PC within seconds. All four of our iSCSI ports were linked to an Extreme Networks 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, which served as our back-end SAN switch fabric. While the MD3000i does not specifically require Gigabit Ethernet, it is strongly recommended.


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We also compared the MD3000i to an EMC Fiber Channel SAN. Test clients in our lab connected at 100Mpbs Ethernet (to Gigabit Ethernet ports) saw no difference in performance copying a 500MB file from an EMC Fibre Channel SAN vs. the Dell MD3000i IP SAN. As long as your back-end network infrastructure that acts as the SAN fabric can support the necessary throughput to the MD3000i, you should realize similar performance benefits from iSCSI as Fiber Channel.

From a fault-tolerance perspective, the dual active/active controllers and power supplies passed all of our failover tests when we pulled various interfaces and power cables from the unit. Using the built-in alerting and SNMP capabilities, we trapped various fault conditions up to a third-party SNMP reporting tool. Within seconds, e-mails alerted us that an iSCSI interface and power supply had failed.

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