About IP Storage

"2007 was another successful year for iSCSI SAN technologies as they solidified their position as a robust and affordable storage solution, replacing direct-attached storage for mission critical Windows environments," said David Dale, SNIA IP Storage Forum chair. "We anticipate continued growth in 2008, as complete and robust solutions for Linux, Unix and virtual server environments gain traction, and 10Gb Ethernet based solutions drive the technology into high performance environments."

Three core IETF-ratified block storage protocols may be the basis of IP Storage solutions:

• iSCSI is a TCP/IP-based SCSI protocol for establishing and managing connections between IP-based storage devices, hosts and clients. iSCSI enables the deployment of IP-based SANs
• FCIP is a TCP/IP-based tunneling protocol for connecting geographically distributed Fibre Channel SANs
• iFCP is a TCP/IP-based protocol for interconnecting Fibre Channel storage devices or Fibre Channel SANs using an IP infrastructure in conjunction with, or in place of, Fibre Channel switching and routing elements
  

IDC views iSCSI as the fastest-growing area of the storage market - with an expected 73 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 2006-2010, and the market reaching $5.1B in 2010 (source: IDC Storage Tracker, Fall 2006). Many analysts now view IP Storage as an appropriate mainstream networked storage solution for business critical IT environments.

"It is our view that iSCSI has entered the early mainstream. We recently completed research that surveyed 511 IT end user companies of all sizes and industries. 17 percent had adopted iSCSI, and another 20 percent planned to implement within the next 12 to 24 months. Combined, this represents 37 percent of the total respondents. We see this as real validation that iSCSI is a viable alternative to Fibre Channel that early adopters claim is less expensive and much easier to manage. We believe that the iSCSI momentum is unstoppable.
Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. December, 2006

Over the last few years iSCSI matured rapidly with growing acceptance and credibility from SMBs and Enterprise Customers. We've seen complete support for all of the major operating systems, a variety of iSCSI host bus adapter (HBA) offerings, multi-pathing solutions, cluster support, SAN boot, enterprise backup integration and next-generation data services are at par with fiber channel based storage. In the technical community, there is a continuous effort to innovate and improve the iSCSI eco system. 10G Ethernets deployments are not far away and with improvements like scalable networking, TCP offloading we are opening the flood gates for performance coupled with ease of use. Various standard bodies are working on FCoE, RDMA, Infiniband, iSCSI Management (Storage Management Initiative and iSCSI Management API) which further improves IP Storage usage scenarios.

• Hot Topics
• Register for More Information
• IPS Product Showcase
• End Users
• IPS Solutions Directory
• IP Storage Initiative
  (IPSI) Europe