Potential of iSCSI on tape
Your comments are directly related to disk drives, and I think the big "knock" on iSCSI disk is speed. But you know that Quantum/ATL has demonstrated iSCSI attached DLT8000, SDLT220 and LTO tape drives. What do you think of the potential of iSCSI on tape, based on the lower I/O requirement for tape drives (6 to 40MB/s per drive)?

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I'm trying to remember what I said about iSCSI and disk drives. I probably said something about iSCSI being a potential problem with transaction processing applications. Typically these would work with disk subsystems, not individual drives necessarily.

Any way, back to your question about iSCSI and tape. Sure iSCSI can be very effective with tape drives and tape automation. No reason why it wouldn't. No difference between tape on iSCSI and tape on FC. The important thing to keep in mind is that you compare apples to apples for network performance. That means Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI will work as well as FC, but 100BaseT networks are unlikely to keep pace with FC.

Regards,
Marc

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This was first published in October 2001