When kicking tires on network storage solutions two years ago, Orange County's Credit Union was like the longing child eyeballing the biggest, noisiest toy in the toy store display.
Laura Thompson, vp of technical services and other officials at the Santa Ana, CA credit union were wowed by the performance possibilities of using fiber channel SAN, the Lexus of storage area network solutions that, like the car, commands a sky-high price. In the market for more than a decade, fiber network storage is getting bigger and faster, such as with EMC's new storage array featuring a petabyte (or 1,024 terabytes) of insanely generous capacity.
Being a $730 million credit union, Orange County's taking on a fiber channel SAN was a bit much to chew-both in size and cost. "There was no way we could justify that," she says.
But a year later, Orange County found a Honda. After getting a pitch from IP SAN provider EqualLogic, they discovered an alternative SAN that was almost half the cost of deployment and would serve its needs for scalability and real-time data management across branches and division.
Called iSCSI (since it uses the traditional Small Computer Systems interface), the enterprise-class solution works with distributed IP packets of information, no more complicated or byte-intensive than a print-serve command or a sent e-mail from a desktop computer through a single management interface. "It's just like another device on the network," says Rob Higby, product marketing director for EqualLogic.
iSCSI, which can cost half the array of a fiber channel SAN and allow more capital for additional application server capacity, has grown dramatically across multiple industries since hitting the market last year. Firms like EqualLogic are making a play for financial institutions looking for automated data management and disaster recovery alternatives to direct-attached storage (DAS) devices that limit backup options and usually require an over-investment in hard-drive space within siloed organizations.
"What we've seen a huge huge growth in," says Higby, "is our financial customers installing our array at one site for production or real-time data purposes, but also installing at a second system so they can remotely have copy in case something happens to the servers on that site. Disaster recovery has been a hot theme in that industry, because it's gone very electronic."
"For our financial customers, all of them are consolidating direct attached storage to iSCSI SAN," says Roman Kichorowsky, EqualLogic spokesman. "People are going to stop deploying more DAS because it's inefficient, it's expensive, hard to manage, and more importantly, hard to back up and hard to protect islands of storage throughout an organization."
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a research firm following the storage area network market, estimates there were 2,500 iSCSI cross-industry deployments through the end of 2004, and expects a substantial increase this year. Brian Garrett, an analyst with ESG, estimates the substantial cost savings at more than 50 percent for smaller firms utilizing iSCSI rather than the fiber channel SAN-$3 to $7 per gigabyte vs. $10 to $15.
Higby notes not only the lower implementation cost but the savings from reduced training demand. The iSCSI SAN solution has a flat learning curve for IT staff training because of the well-known IP protocols comprising iSCSI.
"Fiber channel has been the protocol of last 10 to 15 years of how SANs talk, but it's incredibly expensive, hard to manage, and you need folks to come out and install it," says Higby. ROI for iSCSI can return in as little as six months, according to Higby, "and incrementally notice the economies of scale that kick in not with that one system they bought with us, but more importantly as they begin to build the rest of their organization around our infrastructure."
For security concerns that arise from the use of networks, most SANs are segregated from other company networks utilizing virtual LANs and internet protocol security frameworks using authorization, challenge authentication, and encryption technologies.
IT research firm IDC has projected iSCSI market growth at 211 percent compound annual growth projection through 2009, with 2.5 million installed terabytes, according to research firm IDC. The massive fiber channel solutions will also grow substantially through deployments in large corporate environments (surpassing 3 million terabytes in the same time frame), but won't generate the 107 percent revenue growth projection forecast for iSCSI.
Garrett says three players-market share leader Network Application (which has more than 2,000 iSCSI clients), startup Instransa and EqualLogic-are presently dominating the banking space. NetApp also incorporate fiber channel SAN options for clients, with iSCSI as an affordable alternative or a supplement to a fiber deployment.
