I know it's been a couple of weeks since I last made a blog entry. But unlike some vacations in the past, I decided that my time off this year would not be a working vacation. Instead, I took my daughter and we headed for the West Coast and that traditional rite of passage, the summer college search.

Despite the best efforts of the airline, hotel and rental car industries, we survived the trip. Even better, we were able to narrow down the college choices enough that my daughter now knows that there are a couple of California universities that she's not interested in attending.

Now, however, I'm back, giving up my brief stint as a tour guide and easing back into the role of product tester. When I got back, the first thing I found waiting for me was a storage area network server. I began testing it this week, although this did not turn out to be an activity that was all that easy to accomplish.

I knew this test would be a challenge when the FedEx driver started complaining before she even got the box into the office. It was, she pointed out, 150 pounds of something, and dragging it from the truck took some real doing.

Eventually, the SAN made it inside, and I got it opened and mounted on the cart where these things live while they're undergoing tests. Once the SAN was wheeled back into the lab, preparations for the test began in earnest. This particular SAN comes with six Ethernet ports on the back panel. Two are management ports, and the other four are for connections to a server so that the server—in this case a Windows 2003 Server—can communicate with its storage.

The SAN uses Gigabit Ethernet. The two management ports can go to any Ethernet network. The four other Ethernet ports are for storage data and they must be connected on dedicated subnets that they share with the server. All of these Ethernet connections mean that you either need a lot of ports on your existing network as well as a switch that can set up dedicated VLANs, or you need a separate switch. I used a separate Gigabit Ethernet switch where the test setup required seven of the eight available GbE ports. One of the seven was a link to the core network switch and the other six were for storage.

You've probably noticed by now that I haven't mentioned the exact type of SAN I'm testing or the name of the company that makes it. This is because we're getting an early look at this switch, but we're not supposed to tell anyone that we have it. Of course, there are probably other magazines testing the same switch at the same time, but for reasons that remain obscure, we're required to maintain the elaborate fiction that this SAN is just a secret between us.

Still, a promise is a promise. So I'll keep the blog updated and eventually, apparently on September 10, I'll be able to say who provided this SAN. Just pretend to be surprised when that day comes.