A storage administrator needs highly available connectivity from a Microsoft Windows host to an iSCSI storage array. The administrator needs to ensure that the data is still available in the event of

MPIO (Multipath I/O) is the Microsoft framework that discovers and manages redundant network paths from a Windows initiator to an iSCSI target. When a network port fails, MPIO's Device Specific Module (DSM) reroutes all I/O to a surviving path without interrupting data access, which directly satisfies the high-availability requirement for a network port failure scenario.

NIC teaming provides link aggregation and network-level failover but does not manage storage I/O paths at the block level the way MPIO does, and it is not recognized by iSCSI initiators as a path management mechanism.

Storage cluster services provide application-level high availability across multiple hosts but do not address single-host storage path redundancy to a shared iSCSI array.

iSCSI initiator failover is not a named Windows feature; path failover for iSCSI on Windows is handled by MPIO combined with a DSM, not by a standalone failover setting on the initiator.