Clipper Analyst Note: iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) — Panacea or Placebo

With the remarkable growth of storage in data centers and remote offices, efficient block storage management and economic access to enterprise information has become both more important and more difficult to achieve. Enterprise storage is often doubling each year as businesses generate increasing volumes of business-critical information. The overall requirement to store, backup, archive and protect enterprise data has resulted in an era of unprecedented growth in networked storage while data center staffs strive to remain within the IT budget. Storage area networks (SAN) allow shared access to storage resources to map and unmap virtual disks dynamically. This enables more efficient utilization of the resource and easier management through the development of storage networking technology which enables the sharing of network-attached storage by any server connected to the same network.


Advancements within Ethernet technology, enabling high-speed, secure Internet communications, raises the possibility of the use of TCP/IP for SAN communication using the same protocol that supports communication between the servers. Flexibility and ease of use are the key words, as Tier 1 storage suppliers enable the overnight deployment and installation of iSCSI arrays rather than the days, or weeks, necessary to deploy a Fibre Channel (FC) solution. Every smaller business or department in the larger enterprise needs to consider iSCSI as a primary network to access enterprise storage at the right price for their email, database and Web services, as well as other mission-critical business applications.