Contemplating IT

Besides being the longest palindrome in storage, iSCSI has had an uphill climb over the years to get where it has. I remember when the naysayers said that iSCSI would lose data and never be viable. I remember when people also thought that iSCSI wouldn't perform well and they were proven wrong. Today there are tens of thousands of iSCSI implementations and every major storage vendor has an iSCSI solution. Dell recently announced its earnings and the shining star was its EqualLogic storage which grew 71% from last year. Not too shabby. HP bought LeftHand last year for about $360 million. I think LeftHand has one of the best SAN solutions out there in terms of ease of management, scalability and functionality.

NetApp was the leading big storage vendor that embraced iSCSI first and I find that their unified storage approach to be very interesting combining NAS and SAN. NFS is arguably the easiest protocol to work with VMware but not every application is going to run on VMware - that is why its important to support multiple protocols - matching use case and applications with what makes sense whether its iSCSI, FC, NFS or CIFS.

EMC, HDS and IBM all have iSCSI storage in their portfolios but I am not sure it is relatively a big deal for any of them at this point. However, recently QLogic announced a 10 GbE iSCSI router that is part of the EMC Select program and is integrated with the CLARiiON. Yes, the CLARiiON does support native iSCSI but for those customers that have only FC connectivity this is a way to implement iSCSI using your existing storage systems. This is a smart move but they should also support the Symmetrix since there are probably thousands of stranded servers in large Enterprise customers that could take advantage of a 10 GbE iSCSI to FC router that are big Symm shops.

I was just at an HDS Financial Forum in NYC and I asked a number of IT professionals how many of them were using iSCSI and not one of them raised their hands. Now keep in mind that they all worked for large companies in the financial sector but I thought at least one of them would have implemented iSCSI. However, each of them was keeping an eye on FCoE. On some level this is understandable since they have made such a large investment in FC. But in the end the storage vendors have still failed to educate large Enterprises how they can leverage iSCSI to their advantage. If they fail to do so in this economy then they never probably never will.

Speaking of education - here is a great blog on using iSCSI with VMware.

On the other side of the spectrum - in the world of single server connectivity - Data Robotics came out with the new DroboPro that supports iSCSI to connect to a single server. It isn't meant to hook up to a network and be shared by multiple servers but as a fast performance interconnect for a single server. I am a big proponent of the Drobo - it reinvents RAID and is a highly virtualized storage system.

iSCSI isn't getting the attention it once did. Perhaps because it is far more mature and the debates of viability are over. However, I do think there is more education required on how it can be used as an alternative and/or complement to FC. In the end iSCSI is just a protocol and as I have said for years that it is more important to consider the storage system itself. However, iSCSI is something that customers have to decide to deploy and that is why the education is important.

The overall score for iSCSI is a B minus in my opinion. It has been successful in spite of all of the debate and misunderstandings but it still has not reached the level of adoption that it could. And now with FCoE slowly beginning its adoption curve and NFS being an excellent protocol for VMware - the journey for iSCSI will continue to have some uphill climbs.