Advantage IP Protocols

Anal Jain, managing director of Network Appliance for India & SAARC, is a
passionate evangelist of iSCSI, a technology that allows companies to take
advantage of the IP protocols for their networking while relying on SCSI (small
computer system interface) technology to provide data storage. He spoke to
Dataquest about the protocol and why he sees it eating into the marketshare of
the dominant fiber channel technology. Excerpts...

l What is iSCSI all
about? And what is Network Appliance doing on iSCSI?

iSCSI is Internet Protocol (IP)-based, facilitating connections between data
storage facilities over great distances. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
recently ratified it. iSCSI is used to transmit data over LANs, WANs and the
Internet, allowing businesses to quickly retrieve enormous amounts of data
stored at geographically distant locations. It is related to the SCSI standard,
which allows rapid data transfer between hard drives and PCs. By deploying iSCSI,
customers can accelerate their storage consolidation plans in a cost-effective
manner. Network appliance has recently come out with its first native iSCSI
storage solution in the form of iSCSI protocol support and host attach kits for
its unified storage solutions. The move towards iSCSI is keeping with the trend
in the industry to push data sitting on large back-end storage servers out to
the network where more users in an enterprise can use it.

l What are the
advantages of using iSCSI over fiber channel?

To start off, fiber channel deployment is very expensive. Secondly, costs go
up considerably over long distances. Companies need to invest a lot for as the
distance increases. Comparatively, iSCSI works out much cheaper and is ideally
suited for LANs, WANs. Fiber channel’s complexity increases administration
costs, and expertise on fiber channel technology is lesser in the industry. On
the other hand people are pumping money into IP. Not only is IP getting faster
but also easier to manage. There are enough people today who know how to run IP.
I believe that the future of enterprise storage is iSCSI on IP. It offers the
best of both SAN and NAS. Also, solutions based on iSCSI help reduce connection
costs and remove complexity from a variety of storage applications because of
which the market will shift from direct attached storage to networked storage
systems. One of the biggest advantages of iSCSI’ over competing technologies
is that it takes advantage of existing IP network infrastructure and hence there
are considerable cost savings.

l What do you think
will be the effect of iSCSI on fber channels?

iSCSI will eat into Fiber Channel. As IP speeds goes up, the market would
move away from the more expensive fiber channel technology to iSCSI. Vendors
will have to insist on NAS and iSCSI rather than Fiber channel.

l Typically, NAS is
considered low end...

That’s because most of the players in NAS offer low-end solutions. It
might also have to do with the fact that NAS is much cheaper to deploy compared
to SAN.

TV Mahalingam