When discussing price per megabyte with any vendor, get a detailed breakout of the cost model and make sure the model matches your situation. Remember, dollar-for-dollar benefits may not be there for your site. Be sure to shop around. While a good 16-port entry-level FC switch will set you back $20,000, a realistic base capital expenditure, including switches, HBAs and cabling, can easily cost $50,000--and that's just to set up the subsystems in preparation for storage.
Robust FC SAN implementations can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they continue to go north as requirements increase.
Going with iSCSI for your SAN will save money over FC; FC carries a 50 percent premium per port over copper Gigabit Ethernet ports, exclusive of optics. ISCSI
allows you to spend less, thanks to less expensive components and more familiar technology. But you'll still be making a substantial investment building out a new storage infrastructure. You don't want to run your iSCSI SAN on the same TCP/IP LAN that carries your normal network traffic (see "Don't Sink Your IP SAN"). You'll also need to invest in TOEs (TCP off-load engines) and/or HBAs for any substantial iSCSI installation.
Be sure to review feature sets, and remember what your goals are in moving to any SAN--solid performance, redundancy from bulletproof components, clean hardware design, functional management software and flexible backup. Determine what best suits your needs and shop accordingly.
NAS provides an excellent, relatively inexpensive solution for small shops. FC SANs deliver performance for those who can justify the high cost of implementation. ISCSI SANs fall somewhere in between, leaning more toward the FC model than the NAS one in terms of cost and performance. If you need the reliability of a SAN, want to utilize your existing IP know-how and are satisfied with the Ethernet switching speeds, iSCSI may be the best solution for you--and may likely yield the best business case after you run the numbers.
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