Share via

iSCSI, cheap disk for archiving?

  • Article

Back in 2002, I was involved in migrating some of Microsoft’s biggest ISP customers from a product we called MCIS (Microsoft Commercial Internet Server) to Exchange 2000.  I was the project manager for Deutsche Telekom (DT) were we had several hundred thousand email boxes and about 40,000 SMTP domains.

 

Hosted Exchange back then was a thing of legend and only wizards such as Colin Ricketts (www.implement.com), Steve Schwartz, Todd Luttinen, Aaron Brown, Gloria Alexander, and Vlad Mott were able to master the spell that conjured Hosted Exchange.  We now have an entire solution team dedicated to High Volume Messaging and Collaboration and it has gotten relatively simple.

 

To add to the complexity, DT wanted to use some equipment they already had, namely a NetApp Filter 840 which is a NAS.  Back then iSCSI was something you called yourself when you were ill.  Actually, NetApp had SnapManager which installed a iSCSI driver on Windows that allowed it connect to the SAN thinking it was real disk. This even worked with a cluster.

 

We had to warn DT that this is not supported, but they insisted.  We went ahead and did the migration, and our stores were on the NAS with decent performance.  About 4 weeks after we completed the migrations, all hell broke loose as the system crashed, and naturally everyone blamed the NAS.  In reality, we had to get Developers from Exchange to connect to our platform to determine the root cause, which turned out to be issues with no message size limits being set for POP3, STORE.EXE bugs as well as IMAP bugs.  We were forced to move the majority of users to other backend that had arbitrated loop fibre storage to eliminate the wild card of iSCSI.  But we NEVER had any issue with the users that say on the NAS, it was completely stable.

 

Why am I mentioning this?  iSCSI is now in a working group, and I don’t think that enough people are utilizing this as low end storage.  With products such as Symantec/Vertias Enterprise Vault for archiving you could buy really cheap NAS devices and archive the older messages to really cheap disk.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2005
    It is good to know that some Hosted Exchange actually happened. I worked on one for Qwest in the spring of 2000 for about 4 months. The development was done and test deployments were ocurring but then it was killed. It was during the Qwest / USWest mess and no one was sure what Qwest wanted to do.
  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2005
    Brian,

    I was involved in that later in the project with Apptimum and the datacenter pods, etc. Maybe you remember David Brandt, Chris Archibold and Mark Garcia, they worked on the Hosted Excahnge stuff at Qwest around that time. Hosted Exchange was really difficult back then, especially around provisioning, now we have sample provisioning code in the solution as well as great partners such as Ensim.