iSCSI Innovators Target Billion-Dollar Market

Considering using an IP network to move terabyte-sized files or for high-speed number-crunching? Forget it.

"These are the areas that Fibre Channel has been deployed, and rightly so," says Cookmeyer, director of enterprise storage products at Selenetix. "In those environments, an IP storage-area network will not keep up. It does not have the throughput."

But iSCSI is not to be completely discounted. Cookmeyer, formerly a senior storage engineer at 3Ware, believes that IP has a place in storage--and, yes, even within the SAN. He believes it's the application that dictates the required speed and throughput, and not every application out there requires 50,000 I/Os per second or 400 Mbps.

"Ninety percent of the applications don't need that kind of throughput," Cookmeyer says. "ISCSI is starting to be embraced by every major entity out there. Plus, the price point is outstanding."

There are applications that function well with an IP network, such as Microsoft Exchange and other e-mail applications. Many customers now consider those to be mission-critical, especially considering the new SEC requirements for data retention. Such demands are making iSCSI a lot more attractive these days, not to mention that many vendors--such as Cisco, HP, IBM and Sun--are starting to offer free iSCSI drivers. Even Microsoft is looking to make an iSCSI driver part of its operating system.

"The time for [iSCSI] is now," Cookmeyer says.

Research firm IDC is forecasting an increase in market demand for iSCSI, predicting the iSCSI array market to jump from $216 million in 2003 to nearly $5 billion in 2007. And companies like Sanrad--VARBusiness' Tech Innovators Award winner in storage--is staking its future on this prediction. Sanrad developed the V-Switch 3000, a network-centric, multiplatform storage device that not only provides the physical capabilities of a switch, but also has some intelligence layered into it. The V-Switch resides in the data path and gives administrators a single, logical view of all the storage resources through the use of virtualization.

In other words, the storage-management and virtualization features take the physical storage resources and pool them into a logical layer so that administrators can define new logical volumes independent of the disks' physical limits. According to a white paper on Sanrad's Web site, the device has multiple functions, which include protocol bridging, routing, switching, security, load balancing, snapshot, high availability and volume management--all within a single platform.

On the front side, the switch is comprised of three ports that connect to the host layer; four ports on the back side connect to the storage side. "We [also] convert iSCSI to either SCSI or Fibre Channel storage protocols," says Zophar Sante, vice president of marketing development at Sanrad.

Moreover, any storage connected to the switch, or any Logical Unit Number (LUN) assigned to the switch, becomes 100 percent managed by the switch. For instance, the switch takes storage resources and can change the properties of the system to create virtual volumes to the host.

"The switch actually becomes the storage," Sante says. "It takes the disk drives and partitions them into small volumes. Then, the small volumes are given out to the individual hosts. It can also take multiple disk drives or LUNs and [combine] them into a single volume."

Proponents of using an IP network to move storage data argue that Fibre Channel-based SANs can no longer be the sole option. Admittedly, Fibre Channel has been used in the majority of SAN installations thus far. But for many, the cost and the complexity of Fibre Channel has become a burden and, in some cases, a hindrance to building a SAN.

Obviously, Fibre Channel is a superior technology designed specifically to handle block-level data transfers at lightning speed. But, especially in Fibre Channel's early days, customers found it to be expensive. A lack of standards caused many interoperability problems among devices. Finally, it required companies to hire storage IT managers who were specially trained in Fibre Channel. With the creation of a designated storage network, the IT environment became inhabited by two separate network worlds: one dominated by Cisco Systems and the other that became a battleground for storage-hardware systems vendors.

ISCSI has provided an opportunity to bring the two networks into one continuous architecture.

"Now, iSCSI can travel from host to storage and back again," Sante says. "There is no limited distance. You can have a host in China and send block-level I/O to California and back again."

Sante concedes that doing such a thing--sending block-level data traveling at a long distance through IP--is painfully slow. "But you can do it. It's important to know you can do it," he says.

Thus far, Sanrad has approximately 50 customers and 100 V-Switch systems in the field. Universities are proving to be potential customers willing to try iSCSI, especially considering many schools are on campus environments and can now build affordable SANs with the use of iSCSI.

"It's very practical in those situations," Sante says.