IOMEGA STORCENTER IX12-300R ADVANCED NETWORK CONFIGURATION GUIDE
Most Gigabit Ethernet switches and Gigabit NICs support Jumbo Frames, but all Fast Ethernet switches and Fast Ethernet NICs do not support Jumbo Frames. Normally IP networks require that all hosts in a subnet have an identical MTU. Therefore, when using Jumbo Frames, the best practice is to enable Jumbo Frames on all network interfaces connected to the same subnet. To reduce interoperability issues, NICs capable of Jumbo Frames require explicit configuration to enable Jumbo Frame.
The StorCenter ix12-300r supports Jumbo Frames of sizes 4000 and 9000 bytes. Jumbo Frame can be configured on individual interfaces and bonded interfaces.
OTHER I/O HIGH AVAILABILITY OPTIONS
All services on the StorCenter ix12-300r can take advantage of the advanced network capabilities described in this paper to improve performance, security, and high availability. Additionally, the iSCSI service can leverage the Multipath I/O (MPIO) solution at the application layer to achieve enhanced high availability and improved I/O performance.
The StorCenter ix12-300r network storage array is a certified iSCSI hardware-based RAID storage array with MPIO support for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Additionally, the StorCenter ix12-300r server is certified iSCSI storage with MPIO support for the VMware vSphere 4 virtualization platform.
To improve performance and data availability at the data path level, a hardware-based network solution or a software-based MPIO solution or a combination of both can be deployed. The network solution requires that both the storage device and server have at least two NICs that can be bonded together. The MPIO solution provides redundant logic data paths – iSCSI sessions – from an iSCSI initiator to an iSCSI target. For details about how to use MPIO with a Windows server or an ESX 4.0 server, refer to white papers Using Microsoft MPIO with Iomega StorCenter for iSCSI High Availability and Using Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d NAS Server with VMware vSphere 4, respectively.