5. Both iSCSI and Fibre Channel use a serialization of SCSI, a channel protocol for storage I/O. The key technical difference is the transport used by each interconnect (TCP for iSCSI, FCP for FC fabrics). If the two are more similar than dissimilar, why should a company field a separate channel interconnect rather than use existing investments in networks to interconnect storage and servers?
6. FC SANs are increasingly seen behind NAS heads, which are said to act as gateways to SANs and provide hosting for SAN management utilities. Taking this design choice to the next level, wouldn't it make sense for NAS gateways to support both NFS/CIFS and iSCSI on the front end in order to aggregate storage traffic?
7. ISCSI standards do not seem to have been "held hostage" to proprietary vendor interests the way FCP standards have been at ANSI (it is an established fact that vendors can develop FC switches that fully comply with ANSI standards, yet fail to be compatible with one another). From the consumer's perspective, isn't it smarter to go with iSCSI-based technologies because of product interoperability?
8. At one point, vendors touted iSCSI as the foundational technology for building "SANs for the rest of us""that is, companies that are not necessarily Fortune 500 status. Do you embrace this view? And if so:
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