SNIA chief predicts surge in IP storage
SNIA chief predicts surge in IP storage
Aug 15, 2005: The cost-effectiveness and of IP storage and the benefits it delivers in terms of manageability is set to create significant opportunities for those who deliver the components needed to enable such connectivity.
That is the view of SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) ANZ chairman, Garry Barker, who talks about the recent interest in IP storage in his latest email posting for the association.
"The benefits being sought from IP storage include those of the higher cost Storage Area Networks (SANs) – without the cost. The application availability, resource utilisation and personnel productivity benefits of SANs are well established. Can they be achieved at a lower cost? The expectation is that they can," said Barker.
Put simply, IP storage is a connectivity option to use IP protocols to access data over a network, often an Ethernet network, including LANs and WANs. A number of vendors offer appliances, gateways, host bus adapters and other technologies to put it into play.
"IP storage is not inherently new. It has been possible to connect to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for many years over IP networks. NAS started out as providing file serving capability to users and to other application servers and over time has allowed access to databases. For some, this was all they needed – for others, accessing data bases via NAS devices didn’t quite meet their needs.
"In recent years, iSCSI has emerged as a significant protocol to allow access to virtually any type of data on centralised storage devices. It doesn’t replace NAS devices, but complements them by filling out the capability available over IP networks. A number of vendors now offer iSCSI appliances, gateways and other components," added Barker.
Barker said that until now, storage networking has largely been the realm of larger installations and generally in their data centre environments. This is typically because of the cost of the Fibre Channel infrastructure needed to drive a SAN, including special host bus adapters and fibre switches. He said that iSCSI now allows much the same connectivity options as those of SANs over relatively lower cost and more familiar technologies.
"The implications are far reaching. Firstly, for current users of SAN technology, it becomes more cost effective to spread the SAN concept to lower cost servers in their data centres. It also allows them to consider centralising storage currently located in distributed office environments; the manageability benefits of this are significant.
"Secondly, smaller installations, perhaps with only a handful of servers can afford to put in a fully centralised storage infrastructure, for those same manageability benefits. This implies that the industry now will be supporting the needs of a much broader range and a far greater number of business types and sizes with storage networking capabilities.
"Smaller businesses often don’t want to spend time and energy on integrating technologies, but still want the benefits of centralisation and consolidation. I expect there will be a great need for service providers, particularly systems integrators to help their storage networking projects."
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