In my previous post, I discussed a storage system for my home theater network that would store all my digital video and music content. While it would be certainly reasonable to map shares from every computer and DVR to the server, we can get a bit of an added performance boost by attaching to it via iSCSI. In some setups, in may be necessary to map UNC shares, for instance, if you cannot or do not want to run additional cabling for your dedicated iSCSI network.

In my scenario, I plan on installing a dedicated set of ethernet cabling for the purpose of iSCSI, seperate from the data network used for general internet access or streaming content. As you may be asking yourself already, “Jim, wouldn’t this require TWO gigabit ethernet switches so that the traffic is partitioned and not stepping on each other?” You are correct. Gigabit switches are getting cheap these days. I could optionally use 2 low end gigabit switches, such as the D-Link DES-1026G, or the Linksys SRW2048. I have not entire decided on exactly what switche(s) I will use for my network yet, but chances are likely I will use my industry connections and end up with a Cisco Catalyst gigabit switch. This is my preference, since I can partition a catalyst and get by with 1 switch instead of 2, plus create any VLAN and custom configuration I see fit for the ports.

Regardless of which route I choose, I will end up with a gigabit network for the iSCSI, and a minimum 100Mb network for the data/internet/etc. I will certainly update this post when I have narrowed this decision a little more.