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GCN Home > 05/23/05 issue

NASA, we have cheap storage

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

IP SANs offer most of the performance of Fibre Channel, but at a fraction of the cost

“We’re taking a little bit of a gamble,” admitted Jeff Seaton, the chief technology officer for NASA’s Langley Research Center.

The Hampton, Va., center is phasing in a storage area network built from off-the-shelf IP-based networking gear. This new type of storage network, called an IP SAN, can be less expensive than typical storage networks, but because the standard underpinning of IP SAN operations, known as Internet SCSI or iSCSI, has only recently been ratified, few organizations have truly road-tested the technology.

But last summer, when Seaton started to think about storage for the center’s new research repository, IP SAN seemed like the best fit. Top-speed performance was not crucial. Keeping costs low, on the other hand, was essential. So was easy scalability. These requirements played to the strengths of IP SANs.

Because the technology uses off-the-shelf networking components, IP SANs are less expensive than other SANs and technical expertise is easy to find. Experts say if customers don’t mind that their SAN doesn’t perform as quickly as other products on the market, they can save as much as 80 percent in procurement costs. For NASA, it was a reasonable trade-off.

The year of the IP SAN

Although IP SAN vendors have been in the market for a few years, analysts believe 2005 may be the year that IP SANs enjoy mass deployment. In February, EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., introduced iSCSI versions of its Clariion midrange SAN systems. In April, IBM Corp. of Ar-monk, N.Y., decided to resell iSCSI systems from Network Appliance Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. Dell Inc. now offers rebranded versions of EMC’s arrays through its own sales channel. And MPC Computers LLC of Nampa, Idaho, has also jumped into the market.

“Right now iSCSI is kind of a land grab. Everyone is getting into the market,” said Jay Masterson, a systems engineer at MPC.

Beyond the household names, a host of up-and-coming storage companies are also creating IP SAN products. One such company is EqualLogic Inc. of Nashua, N.H., which supplied Langley with its iSCSI-based system.

Langley needed a SAN to hold a repository of researcher documents.

More news on related topics: Storage Management, IT in Action



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