This Blog will contain my rambling about my Storage Area Network and other Network Storage devices and equipment I have. As I start this Blog, I have been steadily increasing my storage capacity and complexity over the past 10 years.
A brief history. I started out with a simple idea to use Windows Media Center Edition to store and serve all of my video and photograph needs. To accomplish this I created a server with about 2 terabytes of storage. This was Windows Small Business Server 2003 running on a modified workstation to accommodate six removable hard drives with four other mounted internally.
Some 10 years later, currently I am running an IBM 3650 server with Windows 2008 R2 as the host OS. I have several virtual machines provisioned on Hyper-V. An Exchange 2010 to manage my family mail and smartphones, Windows 2008 (32bit) for storage networking, a Windows XP minimal install to run my Eye-Fi, and several workstations and test environments running everything from Windows to Linux to DOS. (Thank you Microsoft Action Pack, without this subscription I wouldn't have the licenses and be very poor)
To round out my "production" hardware the server is attached to a Promise Vtrak M300i with 12 two terabyte WD Green drives. The server uses two Broadcom NetXtreme II with iSCSI offload to achieve a nice transfer rate.
My current test environment is an IBM 3550 attached to a Promise Vtrak M610p and a Vtrak M500i. Currently I also have a M300j in the "lab" but it isn't attached to anything due to some issues with my WD drives not working well with the expanders.
I hope to talk about my setup issues with equipment as I remember and as I get new stuff. Currently I am waiting for a Promise Vtrak M310p to arrive this week as well as an new SCSI PCIe card. My aim is to perform a stress test between the M300i and the M310p and hopefully put the M610p into production alongside the M300i.
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