Articles
RSSiSCSI Graduates Beyond SMBs And Joins Fibre Channel In The Enterprise By Jay Kramer, iStor Networks, Inc.
October 15, 2007
•Article: iSCSI
Strange as it might appear on the surface, the information storage requirements of Small-to-Medium sized Businesses (SMBs) and enterprise organizations are fundamentally the same. There were significant differences between the two in the past, but today the need for high-performance, high availability IT systems transcends all business environments. The main areas of differentiation are cost and simplicity. SMB customers are more price sensitive with their investments and require a truly easy out-of-the-box experience due to limited IT resources. Most SMBs would like the benefits of an enterprise-class storage infrastructure, and the IP Storage Area Network (SAN) facilitates that objective.
Prior to the introduction of the IP SAN, storage area networks were based on Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity and therefore exclusive to the enterprise domain due to cost and management complexity. IP SANs are enabled by iSCSI technology which is simply combining SCSI as the universal standard for how we read and write to disk drives and IP networks driven by Gigabit Ethernet communication which represents the de facto standard for networks. So by utilizing iSCSI technology to transport storage I/O block data over ubiquitous IP networks, the IP SAN finally made SAN benefits accessible to the SMB market — something that enterprises have enjoyed with Fibre Channel for the last decade. IP SANs enable businesses to leverage existing networks and reap the benefits from storage and server consolidation, along with increased performance, capacity and expandability. It's hard to find an entrepreneurial SMB that doesn't have a business strategy to grow into an enterprise; it's simply the American dream. Considering these factors, it's no surprise that SMBs have been the early adopters of iSCSI. Figure 1 provides a number of considerations that explains the general capabilities of SANs and the sweet spot that iSCSI provides which leads to the popularity of this technology.
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