Three storage vendors are claiming to have cobbled together a SCSI
over IP (iSCSI) storage network from off-the-shelf hardware,
beating by a year industry expectations about when the first viable
iSCSI storage area networks (SAN) would ship.
Alacritech, Nishan Systems and Hitachi Data Systems said they used
servers, switches and RAID devices that are already shipping to
achieve wire-speed iSCSI, with data transfer rates of 218Mbytes per
second.
In related news, Intel is expected to announce this week that it
too will be releasing an iSCSI host bus adapter (HBA). It will
interoperate with products from Cisco Systems and IBM.
Alacritech said it created an "integrated storage" network
interface card (NIC) that it used in its Gigabit Ethernet server
and that, along with its Storage Accelerator, was connected to a
Nishan IP switch via a single Gigabit Ethernet link. The target
device was a Hitachi Freedom Storage system.
"What's unique about the product we're bringing to market is it's a
device that performs two tasks: On LANs, it delivers wire speed
Ethernet connectivity, and on storage networks, the same adapter
can perform iSCSI moving block-level data," said Alacritech
spokesman Barry Haaser.
Alacritech's HBA takes care of the TCP/IP and iSCSI processing,
off-loading it from the server and freeing up CPU cycles.
"TCP/IP off-load engines should go a long way toward levelling the
differences in resource consumption among storage networking
technologies," said Nick Allen, an analyst at Gartner.
"ISCSI promises to let users operate SAN, NAS, LAN, and wide-area
networks as a single, integrated network. This option will help IT
managers choose storage, server and networking technologies that
are more easily managed, scalable and cost-effective," he added.
Nishan IP Storage switches support Fibre Channel switching, Gigabit
Ethernet switching and wire-speed conversion between Fibre Channel
and Gigabit Ethernet. Each interface can be configured to support
iSCSI end systems, Fibre Channel end systems or Fibre Channel SANs.
"I'm not advocating people throw away their Fibre Channel
architecture, but with this you have the flexibility to build
fabrics where you can use some SCSI and some Fibre Channel," Haaser
said. "This particularly becomes significant when we look at the
enormous investment people have made in IP infrastructures."