"How do you think IP got into the corporate world? It came in through the education sector," says IDC analyst Rick Villars. "That is certainly a community that understands IP, and they're going to be some of the first that are going to be willing to experiment... An absolutely vital part of any IP storage strategy is to get it deployed in the education world."
Enrolling at U of IP
Sterling Griffin, IT manager for the Department of Pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one such early adopter of IP SANs. "The main benefit with iSCSI is that you can reuse your existing subsystems," he says. "It's not proprietary. If you use Fibre Channel -- they might say it's not proprietary, but anyone who's ever worked with it knows it is." [Ed. note: Fibre Channel is technically an industry standard but FC switches from different vendors have exhibited notoriously poor interoperability over the years -- see Has Brocade Seen Interop Light?.]
Griffin says he started looking for a way to move the 14 servers under his direction off a direct-attached storage model and onto a network about two years ago. He looked at SAN storage systems from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) but couldn't afford them. The cost, he says, "exceeded our entire budget." [Ed. note: Talk about your pathology!]
At a time when most iSCSI equipment was just vaporware, he decided to sign up to beta test Sanrad's iSCSI switches. The department has yet to move all of its storage to IP, Griffin says, but is planning to gradually replace all the servers with those that are iSCSI enabled. "The installation was fairly easy," he says. "The switches work with our existing technologies and standard IP connection. We're just using a different initiator."
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