Case study: It came time for us to upgrade our data storage. Our old direct-attached system just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

It was unreliable, inefficient and needed too much down time for our end users. So we decided to switch to networked storage.

Of course, we wanted to make the upgrade in the cheapest way possible – that still met performance needs. After doing some research, we found that iSCSI SAN was the most affordable way to network.

But we also read a lot of industry reports saying that iSCSI wasn’t so hot when it comes to performance. Problem was, most of the benchmark research out there is directed at huge companies with huge storage needs.

But we just needed something that was enough for our small business. So we found a free open source tool that measured the total throughput in our data center.

We ran the app on a typical production day, and it turned out that the iSCSI connectors we were looking at had more than enough capacity.

By testing our system ourselves instead of relying on other people’s research, we avoided buying a lot of unnecessary technology.

(John Anderson, CTO, Interdent,  El Segundo, CA)

Tags: data storage, iSCSI SAN, network, performance