IP SAN: Ready for Prime Time

Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) products were introduced in the 90s to
break the physical distance constraints of the parallel storage interfaces. As
deployment of FC-based storage arrays picked up, more people looked at sharing
the storage arrays among servers.

The Fiber Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN) with switch fabrics was
introduced in the late 90s to enable multiple servers access the storage arrays.
However, the servers still access FC SAN at the block level to maintain the
performance level of the storage access. Due to its complexity and high cost, FC
SANs have been deployed by selected large enterprises for mission critical and
performance driven data center applications.

In the mean time, LAN technologies went from 10 Mbps to Gbps during the '90s.
With the commodity trend of the switched gigabit Ethernet, the Internet SCSI (iSCSI)
standard was introduced in 2003 to leverage the low cost, high performance,
readily available and well-understood IP/Ethernet networks for shared storage
access at the block level.

IP SAN can deliver similar level performance and reliability when implemented
in the same localized environment.

The Sensible SAN

The value of SAN for storage sharing, increased capacity utilization, high
availability of data to clustered applications servers are well understood by
many IT professionals. Based on the technology and available knowledge base of
IP/Ethernet networks, IP SAN provides the same benefits as FC SAN, yet at a much
lower cost, both acquisition and life-cycle operating, cost of ownership.

The enterprise-class IP SAN, as provided by Intransa's IP5000, can be
deployed into operation in less than an hour. Existing IT staff, without special
training become proficient at integrating IP SAN with application servers within
a very short amount of time.

Most of the application hosts today have gigabit Ethernet interfaces already
and can be attached to the IP SAN without being shut down to install the Host
Bus Adaptor (HBA), as is required for FC SAN. The full virtualized and highly
available IP5000 supports storage provisioning using standard and custom
templates and dynamic volume extension on the fly, without interrupting
application services.

When additional physical disk storage is needed, simply plug more IP disks
into the gigabit Ethernet switch and power them up. The IP disks automatically
acquire IP addresses, announce themselves, and are configured into the single,
virtualized storage pool.

The independent storage controller and IP disk architecture of the IP SAN
also supports clustered, active-active, storage controllers.

Thunder on the horizon

Even though the standard was only published a little over a year ago, iSCSI
has already gained wide industry support. Major IT vendors such as Microsoft,
Intel, Network Appliance, Adaptec, qLogic, etc offer iSCSI products. iSCSI
initiators, either as software driver of HBA, are not only available for Window
OSes, but also Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and soon AIX.

Intransa's IP5000 has been deployed into production around the world,
supporting Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle, and document management
applications, as well as home directories, many backup/restore and disaster
recovery services.

Major analysts such as Gartner-Dataquest and IDC project IP SAN to command
upto 40% marketshare by 2007.  

It's easier than you think

Larsen & Toubro recently implemented a client solution that necessitated
a centralized and scalable storage solution at its back-end, one that the
existing Direct Attached Storage (DAS) was unable to provide. L&T then
selected and deployed an Intransa IP5000 based IP-SAN solution. This solution
provided more storage with lower initial cost and TCO, offered easier
ongoing system administration, and supported quicker restores times from disks
than tape. According to Vinay Khargonkar, Assistant General Manager IT, Larsen
& Toubro Ltd, Hazira Works , "Flexibility, easy manageability and low
TCO was what made the Intransa IP SAN solution an attractive proposition for
us". 

IP will deploy significantly faster than voice-over-IP (VoIP) as the
installed base of FC SAN and enterprise NAS is still small relative to the DAS.
New IP SAN based IT solutions and applications are now being developed and
deployed around the world, not just for small-medium enterprises (SME), but also
for large enterprise data centers. As one of the fastest growing IT economy in
the world, the Indian IT market is ripe for IP SAN. Now is the best time for the
system integrators and resellers to offer IP SAN solutions to their IT
customers.

A golden opportunity

The market for iSCSI-enabled disk arrays is estimated to grow from $216
million in 2003 to $4.9 billion by 2007. VARs

and system integrators who have been looking for a suitable alternative to DAS
should now see IP-SANs as an ideal solution that could be easily sold to their
customers. Even for those channel partners who sell, install and maintain Fibre
Channel SANs, the IP-SANs represent an additional business opportunity.

Why? While the large businesses keep Fibre Channel SANs in their data centers
for high-end storage processing, they will look to installing IP SANs in remote
offices to replace DAS.

Large and mid-tier customers who are already convinced about the benefits of
storage networking will easily adopt IP-SANs. Small enterprises are more
challenging to convince of the expense to switch from DAS to SAN. Perhaps, IP-SANs
will convince them to once for all move to a networked storage solution.

Balasubramanian Chandrasekhar
is Country Manager of Intransa India

The Low Hanging Fruit

Enterprises that have the following data storage needs will benefit from IP
SAN now. 

• Many
  application servers each with substantial DAS can be consolidated down to
  fewer servers sharing IP SAN storage.  
• Disaster recovery (DR) capability at a remote and/or secondary data center
  is becoming critical for continued enterprise operation when natural or
  man-made disaster occurs.
• Online or nearline data archives are fast becoming a business critical
  enterprise IT asset. This is driven by both government compliance
  requirements and competitive pressure for differentiated services, such as
  among financial institutions, healthcare, and pharmaceutical companies.
• The amount of emails and multimedia attachments contribute to one of the
  major storage capacity drivers. Emails are not only increasingly part of the
  enterprise´s mission critical IT asset, it is also one of the customer
  acquisition tool for IT portals.
• Streaming digital media applications such as content library for
  production and distribution, and security surveillance video are natural for
  IP SAN. These applications require a big amount of storage at low cost, as
  well as collection and distribution over large data networks.