First, it needed to bring up the additional storage capacity quickly, and implementing Fibre Channel would have required a training period Safeco FIS's IT department didn't have. Moreover, Stocker's group wanted to make only minimal changes to its servers; the StoneFly/Nexsan SAN simply showed up as another drive letter to the Windows 2000 servers. "It really made it easy," he says. "This was zero training."
In addition, says Stocker, the iSCSI-based system was one-seventh the price of Fibre Channel SAN storage. "Our only other option at the time was to buy disks that were 7 cents per megabyte," he says -- which means 1.5 TBytes would have cost $105,000. The StoneFly/Nexsan bundle was priced at $15,000 for the same amount of storage. "We saved $90,000," he says. "You really can't go wrong."
Actually, you can go wrong. Potentially very, very wrong if that comparatively inexpensive system breaks down in the middle of scanning thousands of forms.
But Stocker says the iSCSI protocol has been stable and that the equipment has performed flawlessly. "We've had no problems at all -- it's actually much faster than our previous solution." He attributes most of that performance boost to the fact that the Nexsan ATAboy2 performs RAID across 14 disks, compared with the previous four-disk Compaq SCSI array.
What about the drag on host performance? One of the knocks against iSCSI has been that it has the potential to suck the life out of a server, which must handle certain network I/O functions.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
