Variel Technology – iSCSI and IP SAN Storage Solutions

Overview

Benefits

Applications

White Papers

Resources

Overview

Today, businesses are experiencing an unprecedented need for additional storage to manage a broad range of applications including email, databases, rich media, eCommerce, backup, and government mandates for extended records keeping and compliancy regulations.

At the same time, IT organizations are expected to optimize resources through the consolidation of server and storage networks, meet increasing workload demands, and reduce risks while taking into account total cost and value within IT and business environments.

This seemingly insatiable desire for information and content richness leads to an overwhelming need to network a company's storage. Networking an organization's storage assets is not without challenges. As issues relating to management, utilization, availability and scalability further coalesce, they tend to complicate both the IT and network administrator's lives.

To address these challenges, iSCSI-based IP Storage has rapidly become a mainstream storage networking technology, offering simple, standards-based, secure, and reliable new options to businesses. IP Storage solutions can complement and extend existing SAN environments, or provide affordable new SAN storage solutions in parts of the IT infrastructure still dominated by direct-attached storage (DAS). IP Storage solutions allow organizations to maximize existing IT investments while deploying more effective and efficient data management solutions.

Native iSCSI storage protocol leverages the two most well-understood, mature and standard technologies with near-universal interoperability that have been around for more than twenty years: SCSI and Ethernet.

With ratification and support from IETF, SNIA, University of Hampshire, and others including Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, and the Linux community, iSCSI is poised to revolutionize the race towards blazing performance and connectivity in the storage networking market.

Most analysts now view iSCSI as a standard SAN solution for Windows and Linux server environments in small and medium as well as the large enterprise organizations. According to IDC, iSCSI is considered as the fastest growing area of the storage market, with an expected 211% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 2005-2009, and the market reaching $2.65B in 2009.