White Paper: Windows Server High Availability with Microsoft MPIO

Brief Description

Multipathing and the Microsoft MPIO Driver Architecture
A growing number of organizations require that their data be available 24x7, year round. To meet this requirement, centralized storage must be readily available and resilient to outages. The Microsoft Multipath I/O (MPIO) framework provides support for multiple data paths to storage to improve fault tolerance of connection to storage, and may in some cases provide greater throughput.

Overview

This whitepaper is intended for the following groups:

• The IT executive who is responsible for ensuring data is highly reliable and available and makes the relevant procurement and evaluation decisions. The first half of this paper focuses upon the executive, providing an overview of the problem and the Microsoft implemented solution.

• The storage administrator who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that an organization’s data remains highly available. The second half of the paper addresses the needs of the storage administrator and includes a trouble shooting section

• Storage vendors who target multipath solutions using the Microsoft MPIO framework in Windows Sever 2008 and Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems.

Top of page