"We as a company are extremely bullish on iSCSI," says Keith Brown, director of technology at NetApp. "It fundamentally changes the economics of putting together block-level SANs. It allows you to put together the semantics of a Fibre Channel SAN using conventional infrastructure."
Reading between the lines, though, another interpretation of this move is that not many enterprises would be willing to pay for iSCSI today. It is, after all, a technology that is just getting out of the gate. Tellingly, NetApp -- which issued seven separate press releases today -- wasn't able to specify a single customer that is using the iSCSI option yet. "We currently don't have any customers using iSCSI products," says a NetApp spokeswoman. She says there have been beta customers, but none that are referenceable yet.
While NetApp says it has no plans to ever charge for iSCSI, it will want money for the Intel PRO/1000 T IP Storage Adapters. These are priced at $1,500 each. In the near future, Brown says, NetApp plans to qualify more iSCSI products and software. "Ultimately I'd like iSCSI initiators to be like NFS [Network File System] clients," he says.
NetApp is making the iSCSI support available to customers of its FAS900 series, F800 series, and F87 filers as an upgrade to the Data OnTap operating system software. Brown says all customers need to do is "download our Data OnTap 6.4 release, run it on their existing filers, create some LUNs [logical unit numbers], and slap it out via the iSCSI service. It's really that simple." Administrators manage iSCSI LUNs via the usual NetApp tools, he says.
However, no major enterprise applications have been certified to work with NetApp's iSCSI implementation, including neither Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) SQL Server and Exchange Server nor Oracle Corp.'s (Nasdaq: ORCL) 9i database. Brown says NetApp will pursue certifications with these applications in due course.
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