Introduction to iSCSI

“SANs (Storage Area Networks) are popular as a storage system
for many reasons. Most commonly they are popular because the
storage is centralized allowing easier management, easier
maintenance, very good performance, and it has a good
price/performance ratio. Typical SANs are constructed using Fibre
Channel (FC) networks and FC hard drives, although SATA, SAS, and
SSD drives are used in SANs today.

“FC storage has very good performance from the storage hardware
to the client using FC networks networks at 2Gb/s, 4Gb/s, and now 8
Gb/s speeds. But FC based SANs require an FC card in each client as
well as an FC network (switches) in addition to the normal TCP
networks that clients have, adding cost and complexity to
servers.

“FC based SANs are popular because of very good performance and
all of the benefits of centralized storage. But at the same time,
they can be rather expensive and complex. But, there is the option
of using iSCSI for SANs keeping the benefits of SANs and reducing
the complexity because only a TCP network is needed.”

Complete
Story