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Published on: June 20, 2008
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Unknown
Length: 26 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
Growth of data is a concern for organizations worldwide as more business stakeholders and applications are generating more data that must be stored, accessed, and protected. Managing the costs and complexity of this process gets exponentially harder as the volumes increase and the stringency of regulations and expectations surrounding the availability, performance, and reliability
of this information access grows. This paper is intended to explore the hypothesis that the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) protocol can help manage this growing body of data more easily and more cost-effectively. iSCSI uses standard Ethernet
infrastructure to connect servers to back-end storage and is generally seen as simpler to manage and less costly to deploy than the Fibre Channel (FC) SAN protocol that is more entrenched within enterprise deployments. The question remains, though, whether iSCSI is seen as offering enough performance, reliability, and scalability to displace FC SAN. This Thought Leadership paper is intended to answer these questions through a combination of a quantitative survey of users of both protocols, as well as qualitative interviews with selected respondents from the quantitative survey.