Hi Graeme,

we are running two Exchange Systems with netapp storage. One is connected to the netapps via ISCSI and the bigger one has it's one SAN with 2 fabrics for redundancy reason.

I must say that both systems are running more than well :-) We only had problems with the ISCSI connection when we set it up for the first time. Sometimes the exchange which runs as a clusterressource did not see all drives after a failover. But this was due to a bad Microsoft ISCSI Initiator installation.

What i strongly recommend when using ISCSI is snapdrive which helps you managing your LUNS (e.g. for Exchange). First we tried to do without but got little problems with backups and now after 2 month with snapdrive i do not want to miss it anymore :-)

Regards

Jochen

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Graeme Fowler Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 5:34 PM 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