Today’s business environment is more dynamic than ever. As companies seek to provide local services and products on a global scale, they need to be able to deliver information quickly and seamlessly to a workforce that is growing increasingly distributed. IT organizations must adapt to this accelerating business growth and ensure that employees have the tools and information they need to bring products to market—no matter where the supply chain ends and the customer experience begins.

As a result, IT infrastructure is in a state of significant change. New high-bandwidth, low-latency applications are being rolled out and powerful virtualization technologies are changing the way organizations deploy server, networking and storage resources. These new architectures are much more flexible and require organizations to provision storage resources quickly and easily in an effort to meet dynamic demand. Given these requirements, it is vital that organizations are able to centrally manage and scale shared storage networks.

In the past, organizations were likely to deploy static, inflexible, homogeneous storage environments, typically tabbing a single vendor to provide Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs). These companies relied on the protocol’s advanced functionality to store, deliver and protect business data while viewing manageability as an add-on, a throw-in that their storage vendor—whether it was IBM, EMC, HP, Sun or Hitachi—provided for a nominal fee and sometimes for free. Complexity throughout the shared storage environment was accepted, countered only through advanced training and by expensive consultants.

However, in the past several years, IP storage has gained traction among large and small organizations alike, mainly due to its scalable and increasingly high-performing architecture. While in the past, iSCSI was seen as low-end, bare-bones storage that was better suited for small, non mission-critical environments, the availability of next generation storage products have simplified complex administration while offering new capabilities like non-disruptive scalable performance.

Compared to Fibre Channel, iSCSI is a much better architecture today to best align storage environments with the steady rise of virtualization technologies. These environments need additional flexibility, scalability, high availability, reliability and performance—requirements that the older, static Fibre Channel solutions can not provide. iSCSI allows IT to quickly provision storage resources, integrates shared storage with virtual server environments and enables flexible and dynamic business models.

iSCSI Enables Multi-Site SANs

Distributing storage resources across geography has traditionally been a complex, labor-intensive process, adding unnecessary cost and complexity to storage networks. This cost and complexity inherent in multi-site Fibre Channel SANs prevented most organizations from even attempting to distribute storage volumes, instead relying on centralized SANs in a single location. The organizations then had to set up and administer complex data replication solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes—again, an expensive architecture decision that requires entire data centers to sit idle in case the production environment needs to fail over.

Leading iSCSI SAN solutions allow organizations to take advantage of existing infrastructure to deploy reliable, scalable and efficient multi-site SANs. The performance increases over the past several years make it possible to deliver data quickly across large distances without degrading performance. While resources may be distributed, management remains consolidated through a centralized console, giving administrators the flexibility to deliver storage wherever and whenever the business dictates.

Multi-site iSCSI SANs provide built-in redundancy and fail-over capabilities, protecting the business from regional disasters or data center outages. For example, if a storage node is unavailable, the infrastructure is already in place to quickly and seamlessly redirect the traffic load to available resources—whether volumes are stored on campus or across geographies. When business growth requires additional capacity, nodes can be provisioned quickly using iSCSI, instantly making it available to applications and end users.

Performance Is Scaled with Capacity

iSCSI also enables processing power and bandwidth to be scaled in accordance with capacity. Some iSCSI storage vendors allow customers to build SANs from clusters of storage nodes where each node includes RAM, memory and its own network ports and disk drives, making sure that these resources are not taken away from existing nodes already in production. These resources are also pooled across the storage environment, ensuring that administrators can keep up with dynamic traffic loads and varying business demands without degrading performance.

The older and more static Fibre Channel solutions, on the other hand, need additional networking resources to be added whenever storage volumes are increased, requiring complex and time-consuming configuration that saps performance and adds valuable time to the provisioning process. The long process requires administrators to disconnect applications from storage during maintenance, necessitating additional planned downtime. It is also a more expensive option, requiring additional servers and network infrastructure which leads to further operational expenses.

iSCSI SANs can also significantly increase utilization. With IP storage solutions that stripe data over the entire cluster, capacity is balanced between nodes ensuring that part of the system is not overloaded while other nodes remain under-utilized. Like the ability to deploy multi-site SANs, this capability helps eliminate single points of failure, allowing data to automatically failover between nodes in case of planned or unplanned downtime.

The modular design of iSCSI SANs gives administrators the ability to add, administer and replace nodes quickly and without having to take systems off-line or otherwise affect end user productivity. This ability extends the flexibility of the server network to the storage realm, optimizing the entire IT infrastructure for end-to-end virtualization solutions.

iSCSI has Caught Up with High-Level Functionality

iSCSI is a much better storage architecture option for organizations that want to extend virtualization capabilities throughout the data center and beyond without compromising the high-level advanced features that, in the past, have been exclusively available on Fibre Channel. Most IP storage solutions advances deliver all the features you would expect from an enterprise-class SAN (see sidebar).

With these recent advancements in iSCSI SAN management—including the ability to deploy multi-site SANs, scale performance with capacity and support growing virtual deployments—organizations of all sizes can now deploy an iSCSI SAN environment that is flexible, reliable and can grow in step with business growth.

Larry Cormier is vice president, Marketing at LeftHand Networks and is instrumental in advancing the company’s highly available iSCSI SAN solutions and virtualization technologies.