Plan Your Solution

Enterprises continue to look for cost-effective ways to streamline their IT infrastructure and optimize data management. In the past, although storage consolidation through the deployment of a storage area network (SAN) helped increase utilization and simplify management, this approach has typically required an investment in a Fibre Channel infrastructure. Today, Internet SCSI (iSCSI) offers an alternative by allowing the transmission of data packets over standard Ethernet networks, enabling enterprises to take advantage of existing networking expertise and equipment to help simplify SAN implementation and reduce barriers to wide-scale consolidation.

To help demonstrate how the PowerVault™ MD3000i performs in a consolidated environment, in September 2007, Dell engineers placed the application data for five Dell PowerEdge™ servers on a single PowerVault MD3000i array with two PowerVault MD1000 expansion enclosures. They then simulated a typical workday by running five separate workloads — two nodes of a fully redundant Microsoft® Exchange cluster, a Web-serving application, a Microsoft SQL Server® database and file-serving data transfers — during an eight-hour period. In addition, the test team performed two incremental backups using Symantec™ Backup Exec™ 11d for Windows® Servers during this eight-hour simulation. As the results show, the PowerVault MD3000i provided sufficient throughput to handle the I/O from all of these workloads.