SAN storage comes to an Ethernet near you
SAN storage comes to an Ethernet near you
Internet SCSI was ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force on Friday. Ratification was quickly followed by product announcements from Adaptec and Network Appliance.
The ratification of Internet SCSI (iSCSI) provides end users with a choice of fibre channel or iSCSI for a storage area network (SAN). With iSCSI appearing on the market place, end users will be able to use an Ethernet infrastructure, which is cheaper and easier to implement. Fibre channel protocols are considered to be highly complicated and expensive.
Once the Internet Engineering Task Force had ratified iSCSI Adpatec and Network Appliance (NetApp) announced that new iSCSI products would be joining their product range. Adaptec said it would have a complete line of iSCSI ASICs and host bus adapters available within this quarter to support the standard.
Harry Christian, the marketing manager for NetApp in Australia and New Zealand explained that this announcement is "big news" for them. NetApp have been incorporating the iSCSI for months and is already supported by their operating system (OS). "People are looking for a standard and now it has been made official," he said of the ratification.
Adaptec has already completed the development of its iSCSI products and they are currently under-going Beta testing in SAN environments with several Adaptec partners.
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