Having worked for NetApp supporting Exchange\iSCSI\FCP, and as a customer using NetApp\iSCSI storage for a rather large Exchange infrastructure, I have nothing but good things to say... it works and works very well.

There are some things that FCP does better:

- Speed 2Gb/s vs. iSCSI @ 1Gb/s - Resiliency MPIO on FCP has been around longer than MPIO on iSCSI - Track Record It's very old technology by comparison - iSCSI is still relatively new

However:

iSCSI will likely get a huge boost in speed once 10Gb/s networking hits with full force compared to FCP's next jump to only 4Gb/s.

iSCSI costs way less to implement than FCP due to use of generic\commodity equipment (ie, off the shelf Gig-E switches\NICs\Cables) vs. FCP's specialized\expensive gear (ever price a McData or Brocade switch??).

I am somewhat biased in my opinion - I know that NetApp makes very good HW\SW and has excellent support... I can't speak to the other vendors out there because I frankly don't know them all that well.

Glenn

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Graeme Fowler Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 11:34 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Block access (iSCSI etc)

Hi all

I've recently moved jobs, and one of my new projects is being involved in a major email overhaul for my new employer. We're currently evaluating a whole heap of different aspects (desktop client, web client, clients for unsupported operating systems, diary/calendar, server software etc etc), two of which are Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) and MS Exchange. Both of these require block-level access to disk resources, whether direct attach, across a network using iSCSI, or directly into an FC SAN.

Does anyone on the list have any stories - good, bad, or indifferent - about running the above pieces of software using a filer backend, generally over iSCSI *or* by breaking into the FC backend and hooking the filer into a SAN environment? If you do, I'd be pleased to hear them

- offlist if necessary. If you're running either of them with a SAN backend which isn't NetApp, that's just as useful a data point.

There's a lot of views being expressed in my direction at present which appear to be without foundation, so I'm very interested in any "real world" tales :)

Thanks

Graeme