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iSCSI: The New Storage
Interconnect on the “Block”?
Sean P. Derrington
Consultant, Enterprise Storage and Servers
Appergy, Inc
sean.derrington@appergy.com
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State of the Union
 Economic melee
• Dollars are still tight, how much do I get for $X is
still the mantra
 Execution focused
• IT organizations are increasing becoming execution
focused as staffing and time are precious
 The storage market is seeing significant
innovation and has seen over $1.1B
invested by VCs since July 2002
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Critical Issues
 Ensuring execution for storage infrastructure
and/or consolidation efforts
 Determining technical storage requirements and
delivering storage services
 The current and future state of iSCSI and Fibre
Channel (FC) as storage networking interconnects
 Determining the value and dependency of storage
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Ensuring Execution of Storage
Infrastructure Initiatives
 Storage Area Networks (SANs)
• A SAN is the set of principals of
offloading data and storage traffic from
the application network
•
•
SANs are transport agnostic
•
TCP/IP and Fibre Channel (FC) are both
network transports working at the SCSI
command or “block” level
Goal is to create separate and
manageable networks
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Creating a Storage Infrastructure
Business eXecution System
 Establish business value
• Application and storage service levels
• Approximate ROI
 Create storage infrastructure design
• Storage access, best practices, organizational
structure
 Negotiate with storage vendors
• Requirements driven RFI and RFP
• Managing multiple vendors delivering solution stack
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Determining Technical Storage
Requirements
 Storage access
• SAN, NAS, fixed content
 Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Satisfying business requirements and ensuring regulatory
compliance
 Application recovery
• Mean time to recovery and recovery point objective
 Monitoring and reporting
• Storage resource management, capacity planning, billing, etc.
 Administrative apparatus
• Roles and responsibilities for storage and storage management
tasks
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Delivering Storage Services
 Look to tiered storage
• Platinum, gold, silver levels—don’t get too granular
• Examine a variety of access methods (e.g., SAN, NAS,
fixed content, DAS)
 Maintain application service levels while
introducing storage service levels
• Monitor efficiency, even if only internally reported
• Begin with performance, availability, time to capacity,
functionality, and cost
•
Sourcing will be a larger question raised by senior
management
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The Future of iSCSI and Fibre
Channel
 Extending SANs beyond the campus
 iSCSI directions
 FC in the campus
 The value in storage
 Where’s the intelligence
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Extending SANs beyond the
Campus
 iSCSI and Fibre Channel over
IP (FCIP) will be the two
dominant IP transports for
SCSI block commands
 FCIP will be the dominant WAN
bridging transport for both FC
and iSCSI based campus SANs
 All others (iFCP, mFCP) will be
niches or slowly pass into
obscurity
FC
FCIP
iSCSI
FC
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iSCSI Directions
 10/100mbit vs. Gb vs. 10Gb
•
Forget about 10Gb for the next 5 years—too expensive
 SNICs, TOEs, initiators, and targets
•
•
Low end servers probably won’t need TOEs
CPU utilization and compatibility throughout the “stack”
will remain a challenge
 Enterprise vs. SME
•
•
Could be suitable for both, but iSCSI is not mission critical
Focus on what problem is being solved with iSCSI
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FC: Still Big Man on Campus
 FC will remain the dominant storage interconnect
for the majority of data centers
 iSCSI may provide connectivity for low-end
servers and will put pricing pressure on FC
component (e.g., HBA and switch) vendors
 Skip 4Gb FC (for the select vendors that adopt it),
stay with 2Gb and wait for 10Gb
 Take notice of FC as a host and device
interconnect
•
ATA will play a critical role as device interconnect
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Where’s the Value?
 Storage functionality and management are critical
components in product/strategy evaluation
 Virtualization will continue to be redefined to a
broader storage management definition and is only
one component of a storage infrastructure
 IT organizations must also focus upon sound
procurement, infrastructure, and operational
disciplines—execution
 The “utility data center” model will be fraught will
challenges through 2006 and presumes robust server
and storage virtualization capabilities
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Where’s the Dependency?
 Dependency and intelligence will
reside either in the
Server (e.g., Veritas),
Network (e.g., Softek, DataCore, IBM),
Storage subsystem (e.g., EMC, HP, IBM)
 Focus on storage management
Heterogeneous
Networks
 Policy based storage management
is in its infancy
•
There can be only one
Heterogeneous
Storage
Management
•
•
•
Heterogeneous
Servers
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Bottom Lines
 Storage principles, irrespective of underlying
technologies, are paramount to a robust
storage infrastructure and operations
 Discuss with the business, in their terms,
early and often what storage services they
desire and categorize by application
 FC will remain the dominant host interconnect
 Put iSCSI and FCIP “in their place”
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Appergy, Inc
 Appergy provides clients with a robust method to better
execute on business initiatives.
 The Appergy business execution approach reduces time to
results by:
• eliminating the need for clients to build their own execution structures
(process, rules, and techniques), and
•
providing a robust method that reduces execution oversights that cause
delays.
 The Appergy business execution approach mitigates the risk
of business initiative failure, through the elimination of
uncertainty, by providing an organized, comprehensive and
disciplined business execution approach to which clients can
adhere.
www.appergy.com
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Thank you!
Sean P. Derrington
Consultant, Enterprise Storage and Servers
Appergy, Inc
sean.derrington@appergy.com