Although less than a decade old,
iSCSI storage is already the prevailing choice for small and
medium-sized businesses, as well as large companies looking to milk
their existing
Fibre Channel storage area networks (SAN) before
decommissioning them completely for IP-centric storage. And within
five years, iSCSI will replace Fibre Channel as the dominant
storage networking technology, according to analysts and storage
solution providers interviewed by SearchStorage.com.
"There will be some applications with the type of IOPS that need
Fibre Channel, but users will eventually treat it as a tier and buy
only as much as is really required," says Andrew Reichman, an
analyst with Forrester Research, who tracks data storage systems
and storage management. "People should be judicious and test iSCSI
but use it as much as they can."
Storage solution provider Eagle Software Inc., sold about $2
million worth of iSCSI storage last year, so it's understandable
that Dave Hiechel, president and CEO of the reseller, is bullish on
iSCSI. "It will dominate the market within five years," he says.
"The only change will be if the Fibre Channel folks dramatically
drop their prices."
No one expects that to happen any time soon. According to some
observers, Fibre Channel companies maintain artificially high
prices, thereby closing off the majority of the market and driving
users to iSCSI storage in droves. Fibre Channel component prices
are "outrageously high" and over-priced, according to Paul
Clifford, president of The Davenport Group, a storage reseller.
"I'm very upset with the Fibre Channel industry for keeping the
price of [HBA] cards artificially high when everything else has
fallen over the last seven to eight years," he says. "It's
absolutely ridiculous."
According to a new study by Forrester, host bus adapters (HBA)
still cost between $1,100 and $1,400 a card. Similarly, Fibre
Channel director class switches cost $1,500 per port and fabric
switches go for around $650 per Fibre Channel port. However,
Reichman notes that a Cisco Catalyst 6500 Ethernet switch costs
only $250 per port, and that price difference extends down to the
cabling. Twenty feet of CAT6 Ethernet cable costs about $12 and
from $50 to $150 for the same quantity of Fibre Channel cable. "In
every category, iSCSI is favorable," he says.
SAN outages are often related to the HBA, Reichman notes. "You
buy a multimillion dollar SAN and it's brought down by the HBA
because it did not come factory installed," he says. On the other
hand, iSCSI HBAs are becoming a standard component in many
servers.
Ethernet-based iSCSI is a natural fit for many companies that do
not have Fibre Channel expertise in-house. To Greg Knierieman, vice
president of marketing and business development at Chi Corp., a
specialist in storage networking solutions, iSCSI's success in the
midmarket is "really a no-brainer. You get enterprise-class
features at half the price of a Fibre Channel system and without
the interoperability headaches." Ease of use has helped drive
adoption of iSCSI in VMware environments where Fibre Channel has
not played well to date.
In an effort to prolong the life of Fibre Channel, industry
giants, such as Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Cisco Systems
Inc., EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM and
Intel Corp., recently proposed a standard that will allow Fibre
Channel to be carried over 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) networks.
Called Fibre FCoE, this proposal is still on the drawing board. In
fact, it's at best at least two years out, which gives iSCSI plenty
of time to seep into every corner of the data center, slowly
nailing the coffin on Fibre Channel.