I'm wondering if anyone has tried using the iSCSI initiator for a backup solution on Windows 2003 servers?

Is there any aspect of it you are interested in, or concerned about?

I've been leaning on it for the past few weeks to test out some backup software and storage hardware. The scenario I use is connecting to an iscsi storage array with two nics in order to have multipathing. The MS iscsi initiator does this part well, but with certain iscsi storage targets, if one of the nics becomes disconnected, then the sessions that are assigned to that nic disappear. They don't come back until manually created again or the system is rebooted and persistent paths kicks in. With only a single iscsi session assigned to a specific nic, then that connection disappears and the session goes into a perpetual "reconnecting" state.

However, this seems to only happen with certain hardware. With others, the connections for each session simply go inactive until there is connectivity again. This is a huge concern for me since we use multipathing pretty heavily. This issue doesn't happen with linux's iscsi initiator, so it would seem to be a combination of MS iscsi initiator and specific iscsi SAN storage hardware.

Other than that, the MS initiator works pretty well and provides a nice level of control on how your sessions are built. It can also be set up with "default" selected for everything, if you want to build a session and aren't too worried about how exactly things are set up. Basically, it can be simple but it doesn't sacrifice functionality. At least, that's been my observation.