Debates continue to rage over whether or not the "Year of iSCSI"
has officially arrived, but one thing is for certain, there are
more iSCSI products, more iSCSI accessory devices and more
approaches to the Ethernet-based storage protocol on the market
than ever before.
The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) estimates that today 40,000
iSCSI storage systems are in production use in North America. (This
is compared to an estimated 1,500 as recently as 2004.) ESG senior
analyst Tony Asaro expects that number to rise to about 60,000 by
this time next year.
Those 40,000 iSCSI systems in use today represent a small number
compared to the number of Fibre Channel systems in use. But a key
development has occurred in the last year -- more big legacy
storage vendors, including Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), EMC Corp.
and IBM, have embraced the protocol. This has both validated the
protocol and brought it to a wider audience.
"A lot of people say they like the idea of iSCSI, but they want
their particular vendor to support it," Asaro said. "Now that
companies like EMC, IBM and HDS are supporting it, it's made a big
difference."
That difference is helping the market for iSCSI expand in
several directions. "The market now for iSCSI has become much more
multifaceted," said Steve Norall, analyst with the Taneja Group.
"The last couple of years the market has primarily been SMB and
remote office-focused, dominated by a couple of players, like
EqualLogic [Corp.] and LeftHand [Networks Inc.], but just over the
last six months there's a second market emerging, focused on
high-capacity, high-performance verticals."
Below is a listing of some of the more important iSCSI products
from traditional RAID-based SANs to new, high-capacity,
high-performance designs.
SAN-based iSCSI storage
Some of these products, like EqualLogic's PS Series SANs and
LeftHand's SANiQ clusters, have novel approaches to disk
virtualization, but at heart, the following products are all
block-based, SAN-attached storage systems with RAID or RAID-like
data protection.
| Company name | Product |
| Dell Inc. | MS3000i |
| Dynamic Network Factory | IPBank |
| EqualLogic Corp | PS Series |
| Hifn/Siafu | Swarm |
| iStor Networks Inc. | iS325 Storage Solution |
| iQstor Networks Inc. | iQ1250 |
| LeftHand Networks Inc. | SANiQ |
| LSI Corp./IBM | Simplicity 1532/IBM DS3300 |
| StoneFly | Storage Concentrator |
| Xiotech Corp. | Magnitude 750 |
Multiprotocol devices/iSCSI connectivity
These products offer some combination of network attached
storage (NAS), Fibre Channel, and/or iSCSI access to disks or offer
iSCSI connectivity to an existing Fibre Channel SAN.
| Company name | Product | Protocols |
| Adaptec Corp. | Snapserver | NAS, iSCSI |
| Agami Systems | AIS1006 | NAS, iSCSI |
| BlueArc Corp. | Titan | NAS, iSCSI |
| Compellent Technologies Inc. | StorageCenter SAN | FC, iSCSI |
| EMC Corp. | Clariion | FC, iSCSI |
| EMC Corp. | Celerra | FC, iSCSI, NAS |
| Fujitsu Corp. | All storage systems | FC, iSCSI * |
| Hewlett-Packard Co. | EVA | FC, iSCSI * |
| Hewlett-Packard Co. | All-in-One | NAS, iSCSI |
| Hitachi Data Systems | Adaptable Modular Storage | FC, iSCSI* |
| Hitachi Data Systems | Workgroup Modular Storage | FC, iSCSI* |
| LSI Corp. | SANtricity/IBM DS4000 | FC, iSCSI* |
| Network Appliance Inc. | All storage systems | FC, iSCSI, NAS |
| Nexsan Technologies Inc. | SATABoy, SATABeast | NAS, iSCSI |
| Pillar Data Systems | Axiom | FC, iSCSI, NAS |
*Indicates iSCSI connectivity to an existing Fibre Channel
system; HP, LSI Corp. and HDS all use QLogic's iSCSI routers to
offer this feature.
New designs
Below are a few interesting new approaches to iSCSI-based
storage.
Massively parallel/grid-based iSCSI storage
| Company name | Product |
| Intransa Inc. | StorStac |
| Pivot3 Inc. | RAIGE Storage Cluster |
New SMB/DAS consolidation options
These products use software and virtualization to create iSCSI
SANs out of commodity servers.
| Company name | Product |
| LeftHand Networks Inc. | Virtual SAN Appliance |
| Open-E GmbH | iSCSI-R3 |
| StorMagic | SM Series |
Accessory devices: TCP/IP offload engines (TOE) cards,
accelerators and more
ISCSI acceleration and connectivity
This is a market that was big when iSCSI first appeared, before
server processors gained enough strength to support additional 1
GigE connectivity. Now, according to experts, iSCSI acceleration
devices are making a comeback thanks to 10 GigE on the horizon and
the rise of virtual servers, which put additional strain on CPUs
even in 1 GigE environments.
iSCSI HBAs provide both connectivity to storage and added
CPU horsepower for performance. They are sold by companies that
include:
- Adaptec Corp.
- ATTO Technology
- Emulex Corp.
- Intel Corp.
- Qlogic Corp.
ISCSI accelerators and offload engines are chips that can
be attached to standard server network interface cards (NIC) for
added processing power. The NIC itself provides the connectivity.
Some acceleration products also strip the "chatty" TCP/IP protocol
of extraneous packets, much like wide area network (WAN)
optimization products in the networking world. Accelerators and
TOEs are sold by companies that include:
- 4Blox Inc.
- Alacritech Inc.
- Chelsio Communications
- LeWiz Communications Inc.
- Neterion Technologies
For more on accelerator/TOE product specifications, see
this report.
Initiators and targets
Everyone and their brother has an initiator, which is a piece of
software that connects server to iSCSI storage, and a target, which
is a piece of software that connects storage back to the server.
Most of them are free, and the most popular free initiators and
targets are available from Nimbus Data Systems Inc., Apple Inc. and
Microsoft Corp.