The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved the iSCSI specification as a proposed standard back in February, and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) launched its iSCSI initiator in June, causing a wave of vendor optimism that mainstream adoption of the protocol was right around the corner (see iSCSI Gets Go-Ahead, Microsoft Sparks iSCSI Liftoff, and Panel: iSCSI Clear for Takeoff).
But while the growing chatter around IP storage mainly revolves around iSCSI, some vendors and end users claim that proprietary IP SAN technologies work just as well. One such company is LeftHand, which currently has 50 customers -- five of which are educational institutions -- using its proprietary IP SAN storage arrays. Universities "have limited budget dollars and limited headcount, [but] they're tired of sitting on the sidelines wishing that they could deploy a SAN," says David Bangs!, LeftHand's VP of sales and marketing.
In fact, according to Dave Vigneau, a graduate student currently functioning as director of IT at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., LeftHand's technology is even easier to deploy and cheaper than many of the iSCSI solutions out there. The college, which was outgrowing its direct-attached storage and the EMC Clariion 4500 it was using for file sharing, is in the process of moving its storage to an IP SAN based on LeftHand's Network Storage Module (NSM) hardware.
"We did do research on Fibre Channel, and we talked to a couple other companies about IP SANs, but LeftHand's price per byte was much cheaper than everyone else," Vigneau says. "In some ways it's even easier than an iSCSI network."
While LeftHand insists it's planning on adding iSCSI to its portfolio going forward, Bangs says the company has yet to lose a single business opportunity on the protocol issue. "ISCSI is only a protocol," he says. "ISCSI in and of itself won't allow you to virtualize, or to do block over IP. ISCSI really isn't the issue."
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