iSCSI SAN Design Considerations
A basic difference between iSCSI and Fibre Channel is that when an iSCSI path is overloaded, the TCP/IP protocol drops packets and requires them to be resent. Fibre Channel communications over a dedicated path are not at risk of being overloaded. When a network path carrying iSCSI storage traffic is oversubscribed, a bad situation quickly grows worse and performance further degrades as dropped packets must be resent. Another potential disadvantage with implementing software-initiator iSCSI (but not hardware-initiator iSCSI) is that standard 10/100 Ethernet interfaces do not have enough throughput for practical iSCSI work. Gigabit Ethernet interfaces are required, and those […]
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