Executive Summary:

Two constant driving forces within IT departments are the need to reduce IT costs, and increase the availability of data. These needs have pushed organizations to use many smaller, low cost servers in an effort to get the greatest computing power per dollar spent. With this trend comes increased complexity to manage the environment.

This trend toward larger numbers of servers has also driven more IT departments to put more of their servers and storage on storage area networks (SANs). Increasingly, there is interest in allowing serves to boot from the SAN as this boot configuration can both reduce the cost of ownership and simplify SAN management, while increasing the availability of these servers.

Fibre Channel SANs have supported booting for several years. In iSCSI SANs, host bus adapters (HBAs), as opposed to software initiators, are the best means to implement booting from the SAN. In addition to the enhancements to CPU performance through the processing offload provided by an HBA, the SAN boot advantages will make the investment in HBAs cost effective.

This white paper will explain what SAN boot is, its advantages, and how it works in iSCSI. It will also explain the hardware requirements and applications, and conclude with specific information about QLogic’s iSCSI HBA and its support of SAN boot.
 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AT: http://www.qlogic.com/documents/datasheets/knowledge_data/whitepapers/SN0032004-00A.pdf