iSCSI: The Low-Risk Path To SAN Storage By Paul Massiglia, agami Systems, Inc.

As small businesses grow, their information technology needs inevitably grow, as does their dependence on IT. Staying competitive requires new and upgraded applications; regulatory conformance requires more data analysis and retention; and so forth. To an enterprise trying to concentrate on business, constant changes in the IT environment can feel overwhelming. Sometimes it seems as though servers and data are always in the wrong place, with too much capacity in some and not enough in others.

SAN adoption by SMBs, but using them effectively requires the right type of storage system. An ideal IP-SAN storage system would provide:

• Consolidation: sufficient raw capacity to meet current and projected enterprise needs
• Robustness: protection against both individual component failures (e.g., disk drives) and entire system outages such as might be caused by site disasters
• Performance: streaming and random access performance adequate to meet the needs of multiple clients
• Simplicity: minimal technical know-how required to install, configure, administer, and troubleshoot
• Cost effectiveness: Cost-per-usable-byte at or below that of comparable directly attached storage devices