iSCSI: The New Storage Interconnect on the

1
iSCSI The New Storage Interconnect on the
Block?

• Sean P. Derrington
• Consultant, Enterprise Storage and Servers
• Appergy, Inc
• sean.derrington_at_appergy.com

2
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

3
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

4
Ensuring Execution of Storage Infrastructure
Initiatives
LAN

• 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
• Goal is to create separate and manageable
  networks
• TCP/IP and Fibre Channel (FC) are both network
  transports working at the SCSI command or block
  level

5
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

6
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

7
Delivering Storage Services

• Look to tiered storage
• Platinum, gold, silver levelsdont 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

8
The Future of iSCSI and Fibre Channel

• Extending SANs beyond the campus
• iSCSI directions
• FC in the campus
• The value in storage
• Wheres the intelligence

9
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
FC
iSCSI
10
iSCSI Directions

• 10/100mbit vs. Gb vs. 10Gb
• Forget about 10Gb for the next 5 yearstoo
  expensive
• SNICs, TOEs, initiators, and targets
• Low end servers probably wont 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

11
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

12
Wheres 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
  disciplinesexecution
• The utility data center model will be fraught
  will challenges through 2006 and presumes robust
  server and storage virtualization capabilities

13
Wheres 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
• Policy based storage management is in its infancy
• There can be only one

14
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

15
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

16
Thank you!

• Sean P. Derrington
• Consultant, Enterprise Storage and Servers
• Appergy, Inc
• sean.derrington_at_appergy.com