In "20 Questions," you'll find our analysis of iSCSI's future and synopses of the vendor responses. View the complete list of questions here; full vendor questionnaire responses can be found here.
1. In its early development years, iSCSI had several prominent champions within the vendor community, including IBM and Cisco Systems. The early position of iSCSI advocates was that it would replace Fibre Channel as an interconnect for building SANs. With the delays in standards development, the party line seemed to change: FC would be used to build "core" fabrics, while iSCSI would be used to connect outlying servers to FC fabrics. What is your position on the technical fit for iSCSI?
2. As an IP-based protocol, iSCSI is limited in terms of speeds to available bandwidth less overhead, which is generally interpreted to mean that the technology is capable of delivering roughly 75 percent of the rated speed of the TCP/IP network pipe in megabits or gigabits per second. FC advocates have leveraged this as a major differentiator between FCP and iSCSI. How meaningful is this speed difference today? How meaningful will it be next year with the introduction of 10-Gbps IP nets?
3. Related to the above, how important is interconnect speed to applications? Haven't we made do with much slower storage interconnects in the recent past?
4. Both FC fabrics and iSCSI SANs utilize IP-based applications for management. In the case of iSCSI, management (or control path) is handled in the same network pipe as data and SCSI command traffic. In FCP, the control path and data path use different wires. From the standpoint of scaling, simplified infrastructure and design elegance, iSCSI seems to have an advantage over Fibre Channel's "dual network" design. What do you think?
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