An Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI)-based solution involving EMC Celerra Multi-Path File System-iSCSI (MPFSi) with the Cisco® MDS 9000 Family platform provides ease of management, scalability to thousands of servers, and increased storage utilization. Celerra MPFSi provides the capability to split data locking and block data movement into two paths, where all meta-data locking is processed by the Celerra NAS appliance and all data I/O flows through a storage area network (SAN). The highly available integrated iSCSI features on the Cisco MDS 9000 platform, such as Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) and iSCSI Proxy Initiator, allow the Celerra MPFSi solution to scale for block-level access through iSCSI. This is a lower-cost alternative for NAS-based deployments.
