Question : Problem: Choice of storage technologies

Small manufacturing business with 2 Windows 2003 DCs, one functioning as a file / print server, on Exchange 2007 server and one Windows 2000/SQL 2000 with and ERP system.

A new manufacturing process is going to create a lot more test and quality data (well, perhaps 500GB a year) which needs to be available online.

Speed of access is not promordial. Some servers will be virtualised in the future. Offsite backups are a must, and are at present being done on an Ultruim tape drive.

So what are your recommendations:  Classic file server? iSCSI? Fibre Channel?

Answer : Problem: Choice of storage technologies

If you plan to virtualize in the future and you want a reliable storage solution, I would recommend using iSCSI as that is what we are currently using. Currently we have several large virtual implemenations running off this setup.

Some key highlights are:
Linear scaling of both capacity and performance
Self-managing arrays that continuously monitor storage resources
Top-tier data protection software with a built-in suite of capabilities like snapshots, replication and thin provisioning
No single point of failure thanks to hot swappable components, automatically configured RAID sets and spares and automatic hot sparing and data recovery
Simple deployment that typically takes less than one hour

More info can be found here:
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/solutions/en/iscsi?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz