iSCSI Testing: What are the Test Challenges Under the Hood of a 10 Gb iSCSI Storage Product Certification?

The certification of a 10 Gb iSCSI RAID Storage System elicits a lot of challenges at the development level and the Test / Quality Assurance level. The challenges are due to the fact that a 10 Gb iSCSI is a newly deployed iSCSI host interface in the RAID Storage environment. As a result the size of a development module level test should be designed very carefully to establish a test coverage beyond basic implementation verification, standard RAID testing, or the iSCSI plug fest. These module level tests must tackle the test time windows associated with the following iSCSI characteristics: 1.Device discovery, 2.10 GB switch traffic control and congestion, 3. Security mechanisms with different Operating systems, 4.Operational parameters associated with I/O retries and recovery 5.Management, Administration, and Integration with Storage products 6.Design For Testability “DFT” mechanisms 7. Diagnostics, problem Isolations 8.IPV4 vs. IPV6 However a number of the module tests above can be leveraged from the certification a 1 Gb iSCSI RAID products. There are specific features such as backup, snapshot, remote mirroring, and cluster application compatibility that must be supported by the RAID product and must be verified during the testing of the RAID controller host interface.