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Sidebar | iSCSI storage can help keep your costs down
Do you have a lot of digital content but want to keep costs low? While clustered storage is one way to go, take a look at another emerging approach based on the Internet Small Computer Serial Interface, or iSCSI.
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Clackamas County, Ore., scrapped a five-year-old IBM Fibre Channel storage-area network for an iSCSI SAN from EqualLogic to tackle the county’s application growth. “The big thing we’ve had to solve is the explosion in storage requirements and the ability to manage that,” said Chris Fricke, a senior microcomputer specialist with the county.
“E-mail, document imaging and digital media such as movies and maps and all those services that are being offered by the county is growing exponentially and we needed a way to manage all of that,” he said. “So everything is hosted off our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.”
Approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in February 2003 as a standard for communicating with computer components over a network, iSCSI encapsulates SCSI commands in TCP/IP packets so they can go out over an IP-based network. This allows computers to access disks on the network in the same way they access internal disks. iSCSI can cut the costs of storage considerably because commodity networking equipment can be used, eliminating the need for Fibre Channel, which requires specialized cabling, switches and adapter cards. SCSI disks also tend to be cheaper and require no specialized training beyond basic system administration skills to manage.
Clackamas County, near Mount Hood, is home to more than 338,000 people. The information technology department of 50 employees manages internal and external IT activities for more than 2,000 users.
“The biggest thing we’re doing now, storage-wise, is virtualizing our servers,” Fricke said.
The IT department is deploying VMWare virtualization software, combining application servers and Microsoft SQL servers as well as Exchange servers. Fricke wants a more virtual environment so systems can quickly fail over to another site in the event of emergencies. He wants to be able to replicate data and host servers where it makes sense without provisioning hardware to do it.
Fricke just completed an upgrade on the three-year-old system with no downtime or interruptions.
“None of the things that you have to deal with Fibre Channel are there — no custom cabling, zoning issues nor vendor-centric hardware,” he said. “When you want to connect devices to storage, you have multiple options.”
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