NEW YORK -- What a difference a year makes. A panel of iSCSI early adopters held forth on performance and security this week during a talk at the Storage Decisions conference here. And iSCSI vendors -- who, a few months ago, were behaving more like public penitents -- felt it safe to show their faces in public afterwards(see iSCSI's Second Act and IP Rising).
Despite the accolades, though, the panel made clear iSCSI isn't a full-on replacement for high-end Fibre Channel.
Users Michael Davies of Sawtel Inc., Thomas Reynolds of Idenix Pharmaceuticals, and Ken Walters of PBS, all said they'd implemented iSCSI primarily for economic reasons and were pleasantly surprised with its performance, manageability, and security features.
I needed a cost-effective way to get storage to my blade centers, Walters says. iSCSI let me do that. With Fibre Channel, I would have had to add cards to my blades.
Walters wanted to consolidate the direct-attached storage connected to most of his servers. He was running a Fibre Channel SAN for his heavy lifting applications, but decided on StoneFly Networks Inc. Storage Concentrators to consolidate his DAS. Given that Walters's IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) blade servers had integral Gigabit Ethernet capabilities, iSCSI seemed to make sense. Walters began tests in 2002 and an incremental rollout of iSCSI last year.
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