White Paper: PS Series Deployment - Configuring And Deploying The Dell Equallogic Multipath I/O Device Specific Module

High availability of data is a requirement for many businesses today to ensure protection against system/device faults as well as increasing performance for workload demands. Achieving this level of availability is sometimes a challenging and daunting task for server and storage administrators. Redundant hardware and RAID technologies help but when using a storage area network, SAN, the paths between the servers and the storage are vital for data transfer and availability.

Microsoft provides software to support multiple I/O paths to SAN storage called Multipath I/O. MPIO allows a host to have multiple connected paths to shared storage (Figure 1). MPIO offers increased redundancy and can improve performance of application data hosted on these volumes. Using MPIO, servers can send multiple I/O streams to SAN volumes concurrently.