If anyone is planning on coming to the Networld+Interop show in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks, stop by the iLabs area on the show floor - I'll be there helping out with various things, most particularly the IP Storage Initiative. (Think "Storage Area Networks", SANs.)
(If you are not familiar with iLabs - its a place where we try to push networking technology to its limits, and often beyond. It's a place where still lives the old spirit of hooking up diverse equipment and pounding on it until it interoperates ... or until we collapse in exhaustion.)
I've spent the last couple of days setting up a test rig to subject ISCSI products to various kinds of network conditions. I'll be using my new tool, Maxwell, the Network Impairment System®, to explore the range of network conditions in which ISCSI works well and those in which it does not (yet).
(We've also used Maxwell to do some tests on voice-over-IP [VOIP] systems - See End-to-End VoIP Product Comparison Testing.)
We've got some cool gear at iLabs - In the storage area networks area alone we've got several racks of some seriously heavy-duty SANs clients, servers, switches, and monitors. We also like to add some amusing stuff - like the various networked toasters we did starting in 1990. (I wrote the SNMP stack for the toasters). So, in addition to the heavy iron, we've got what may be one of the largest collections of high speed ISCSI equipment servicing the lowest speed, smallest capacity, lowest performance storage system around.)
So, if you are in the vicinity, stop by.
Posted by karl at April 11, 2003 2:13 AM