The company goes on to say that SANs are necessary in the SMB for the same reasons as they are in the Fortune 500. However, the SMB is looking for less complexity in SAN deployment, which can be met by iSCSI or by a growing number of simplified FC fabric bundles that Redmond is testing in-house. Microsoft's further observations are an interesting read, especially as they pertain to an integrated architecture beginning with the OS. Whatever your opinion of the company, it has clearly thought its iSCSI strategy all the way through.
Microsoft, (800) 426-9400. www.microsoft.com
Network Appliance
It was evident from the first few paragraphs of its response that Network Appliance wants to bring its own kind of wisdom to the iSCSI versus Fibre Channel debate. The company is championing a reworking of the whole server-to-switch-to-storage paradigm by placing an intelligent appliance between the server tier and the back-end SAN. Such a hybrid gateway architecture could provide, on the NAS appliance, a location for storage management, file system support and other control activities.
Network Appliance already supports a block channel in addition to NFS/CIFS connectivity, and it was the first to qualify its storage as a target for Microsoft's initiator. The former was a requirement imposed by Microsoft with the release of Windows 2000 Server: To continue hosting Exchange on its NAS Filers, Network Appliance was obligated to add a block channel. Now, the company is anxious to exploit this technology and produce Filers that can do blocks and files with equal alacrity.
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